The process is rigorous and tiring. At least forty liters of sap is required to make a liter of syrup. Mature trees can produce about forty liters of sap during the one and a half month of sugaring. Trees should at least be forty years old to qualify tapping. If the tree is larger, it may be tapped at both sides for efficiency.
When the sap is collected, it is boiled to the right consistency with extreme accuracy. Miss the 1333 kg/m3 mark, and you will destroy the syrup. Too low, and it will not be sweet enough, too high, and you will have maple sugar crystal. Once the process is done, it is filtered off and bottled while hot.
New technology (actually it is thirty years old), prompted most producers to try using reverse osmosis in removing water before boiling the sap into syrup. The use of this process removes at least three quarters of the original water from the sap, reducing the time needed to expose the syrup to high temperatures and the energy needed to boil the water off.
Another product of boiling the sap is maple sugar, a hard type of candy sold in blocks, resulting when the sap is boiled to a level higher than that required for maple syrup. Other styles and level of boiling can also produce products like maple cream and maple butter, both widely used and eaten with bread.
The prices of maple syrup can be a fickle thing. Prices are determined by the availability of sap and syrup, the grade of the syrup, and the resources needed to transport and market them. These past three years, the market saw an enormous rate of rising due to poor sap flow, inhospitable weather conditions and unstable supplies (Quebec, having been the supplier of most major demands, is slowly depleting its own supplies).
