Sticky Business

We 'finished' our maple syrup this morning - this means boiling off the last bit of excess water so that the syrup has the correct sugar content. This is the point where it would be nice to be in a lab and have access to waterbaths, graduated cylinders and centrifuges. Still, we have a hygrometer and a candy thermometer and managed OK. Sugar content is measured in Brix numbers, which is just a fancy way of talking about per cent solutions. We were aiming for 67 Brix (67g/100mL) for our hot syrup (this is the standard) and luckily enough we were almost there with all three of our batches. We did this part indoors, and the house was filled with the delicious smell of maple syrup!

Now, as novice syrup makers, we were unsure as to whether our syrup is any good or not - sure, it tastes pretty sweet, but are we sophisticated enough judges to detect any 'off' flavours that we may have picked up along the way? We were particularly concerned with the new outdoor stove, which lost a little paint in the first cook... And in truth, I don't think any of our batches smell quite as maply as the stuff that the pros make...

So step in Russ and Chuck, veteran syrup makers and judges at the county fair, who not only taste tested our syrup but shared some of their secrets about how they do the judging. We failed at test number one, clarity, right away as we haven't filtered yet! They liked batch number 3 the best, and thought #1 and #2 had a slightly 'off' taste, but nothing too terrible. We had thought that #2 should be the best as the sap was absolutely fresh. But we decided to pool our batches anyway because the volumes are quite small. A huge thank you to Russ and Chuck. At least we know that we are not going to poison anyone.

For the record, we harvested about 30 gallons of sap which yielded about 3 quarts of syrup - a 40:1 ratio which is just as expected.