Maple Sugar Tour

This is the syrup they had for sale at the nature preserve where we took our tour. It's available for purchase from Justus Asthalter Maple Syrup Inc.

We went on a maple sugar tour at a local nature preserve. This weekend we were still sick, but not too sick, and it was the first nice days in ages...temperatures were in the forties and it was sunny. Also, it was my husband's birthday weekend, so we wanted to spend some family time together.

The tour began with story time around a fire. The storyteller told two American Indian stories about the origins of the use of maple syrup.

The first one is about how maple syrup used to drip from the trees and the people sat under the streams and got fat and lazy. Manabohzo, a Native American Hero thought this just wasn't right, and poured water into all the trees so the people had to work hard to turn the sap into syrup.

The second story was about a chief who threw his axe into a tree out of anger, and sap poured out. His wife caught it in a birch bark bowl, and used it to cook because she thought it was water. The food became very sweet, and that is how they discovered that the "water" could be turned into sweet syrup.

Each child received a small pouch that they wore around their neck, and with each stop on the tour, they received a small, laminated picture to remind them of the stories they learned. Here they received a picture of a birch bark bowl.

Here we learned to identify a sugar maple tree. We need to look for ovals, faces, and "Y"'s. The silhouette of the sugar maple is oval. The bark of the tree is shaggy, and you can see faces in it. Every branch forms a Y all the way from the trunk to the smallest twig. Here, the children received little twigs to put into their story pouch.

My husband is in the plaid jacket carrying our son in this picture.
Then we learned how to tap the sap. A hole is drilled that can only go about 2 inches deep so as not to hurt the tree. A hollow piece of wood or metal is put into the hole. A pail is hung or placed underneath, and the sap drips out. A cover is put onto the pail to keep out water and critters.

Here is what the sap looks like. It looks like water. We even got to taste some, and it tasted like slightly sweet water. Sap is 97% water, and only 3% sugar, so it takes a lot of sap and time to make maple syrup.

Here the children received a picture of a drop of sap for their story pouches.

Here is the heating element they use to boil down the sap into syrup. They keep it over low heat until the water evaporates. Different grades of syrup from Grade A Fancy to Grade B are achieved by using sap from different times during the season (there are grades in between these as well). Grade A Fancy is a light amber syrup from sap collected early in the season (right around now), and Grade B is from sap collected near the end of the season, which lasts for about 4-6 weeks.

Here is where the heating element is located, in the Sugar Shack.

After the tour, I bought some maple sugar candy and maple syrup. I am going to make up a story board for my son's class and send in the maple sugar candy so they can all taste it. Then we went out to dinner for pancakes and waffles, and I brought in the maple syrup. Boy, it was delicious! If you've never tasted real maple syrup, it has a thinner consistency than pancake syrup, it doesn't have the sickening sweet smell, and it has a wonderful depth of flavor, so you don't need to use as much. It's much more expensive because it's so labor intensive, but for a treat, it's wonderful.

It was a lot of fun to go on the tour, and great to get some fresh air for a change. Boy oh boy did we have cabin fever. If you have a chance to go on a maple sugar tour, you should definitely go! :)