Maple Syrup Day

What the day is

Maple Syrup Day is observed on December 17. Real maple syrup is boiled tree sap and nothing else, and it can only be produced in a narrow part of the world.

Origin and background

Indigenous peoples of northeastern North America were tapping maples and concentrating the sap into sugar long before Europeans arrived, and colonists learned the practice from them. Maple sugar, rather than syrup, was the main product for most of that history, because sugar keeps and travels.

The geography is dictated by weather rather than by where the trees grow. Sap flows when nights fall below freezing and days rise above it, because the repeated freeze and thaw creates pressure changes inside the trunk that push sap out through a tap hole. That cycle needs to repeat for weeks, which is why production concentrates in Quebec and the northeastern states and why the season is short and unpredictable. A warm spring simply ends it.

The scale of the reduction surprises people. Sap is around two percent sugar, and syrup is about two thirds sugar, so roughly forty gallons of sap boil down to one of syrup. The whole industry is essentially an exercise in evaporating water.

The grading system changed in 2015, and the old Grade B no longer exists. Syrup is now graded by color and strength of flavor, from golden through amber and dark to very dark. Darker syrup comes from later in the season and tastes stronger. It is not lower quality, which the old letters unhelpfully implied.

Quebec also holds a strategic reserve to steady prices across good and bad years. In an episode that sounds invented, thieves siphoned off millions of dollars of syrup from one of its warehouses over several months, refilling barrels with water to delay discovery.

How to take part

• Check the label says maple syrup and nothing else. Most pancake syrup contains no maple at all.
• Try a dark grade against a golden one. They are genuinely different products.
• Refrigerate it after opening, since real syrup will eventually grow mold and imitation will not.
• Use it somewhere savory, on roasted squash or bacon, where the minerality shows.
• Visit a sugarhouse in late winter if you are anywhere near one.