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After last year’s great maple syrup shortage, we have reason to cheer (and pour copious amounts upon our pancakes): Vermont has pulled off a winner of a year. According to Vermont Public Radio, the state harvested more maple syrup in 2022 than in any previous year (and more than any other state). How much syrup is that? This year, Vermont produced 2.5 million gallons of the sweet stuff. Last year it was only 1.7 million.
That requires a lot of the trees and farmers who must go out in snowshoes on cold winter days on mountainsides to tend the taps, maple specialist Mark Isselhardt told VPR. If you want to regard your little jug with more respect, it’s a general rule of thumb that it takes 40 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of syrup. All that sap must be lugged back to the sugar shack to be boiled down in a process that takes hours – one hour per gallon, typically, so if you’re running a decent-sized operation, you’d be boiling for days. Vermont’s 2.5 million gallon haul means that there were actually 100 million gallons of sap processed by farmers, all via one small tin bucket hung on a tree at a time. Wow.
During the pandemic, there was an increased demand for syrup (more than 20 percent, says Isselhardt), because more people were cooking at home and wanting a simple, one-ingredient sweetener that felt wholesome. The tapping season is only February through April, so Vermont’s season is already wrapped up for this year, and we can all exult that we have enough to carry us through any waffle crisis we may face. And while we may appreciate the bottles of buxom-shaped Mrs. Butterworth, that is not real maple syrup: give yourself a taste test to experience the enormous pleasure of genuine syrup.
Syrup comes in four grades: golden, amber, dark and very dark, increasing in flavor as the color darkens. You may also see Grade A or B on the label; Grade A is sweeter, but Grade B is more flavorful.
So how did Vermont have such a banner year? There were 40 days of sap collection this year, versus 29 last year. Sap only flows when nights are freezing and days are above freezing, but not too warm. The climate emergency plays a role in the future of tapping in the future.
Fun fact? You can tap your own maple tree this winter and make your own syrup. Or maybe you’d prefer to visit a sugar shack where someone else does it for you. This is an event that can’t be missed: a ‘sugar on snow’ party involves drizzling syrup at 235 degrees onto a plate of snow, where it carmelizes into a sort of taffy eaten with a fork. You eat this treat outdoors at a picnic table with two important components: a plain donut and a pickle. It’s like a doing a shot with salt and lime!