Stuff You Should Know - How to Drink a Tree's Blood

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

Of course we're talking all about maple syrup today - the tapping, the processing, the eating.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. and we're talking today about maple syrup, and I'm not going to lie to you, dear listeners. I want something maple, like, right now. I do, too. This was, I don't know if this came from a listener, or it came from many listeners, or just my own brain,

but we, I'm not even thinking, I just threw this one to Livia, kind of forgetting that I don't want to docks Olivia, but let's just say she lives in the New England area. Uh-huh, sure. So she was like, oh, yeah, baby, right up my alley. Let's do it. Yeah, I have the impression that she'll eat a thing of maple cotton candy if you hand it to her. Yeah, I could feel the joy coming through Libya's keyboard in this

one, which is always nice. For sure. And the timing's amazing too, because the sugaring season is basically just wrapped up as far as I can tell. And I think it was a good one. Yeah. Yeah. Livya also just says a little thing. Remember, we've said that she always has great titles. and this one was How to Drink a Tree's Blood. Yeah, I think that's going to be the title. Oh, good, okay, good. I mean, I might put in parentheses, maple syrup, you sicko, or something like that. Sure, I like that.

Anytime Sicko ends up in a title, I think something great has happened. Including the movie Sicko. So is there a movie called Sicko? Yeah, wasn't that one of Harmony Carine's movie or Carine? I don't know. I think so. No, no, that was Michael Moore. Sorry. Michael. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The documentary. Yeah, yeah, about the American health care system and how broken it is.

Yeah. So, Chuck, all right, so let's talk about maple syrup. We both want some maple syrup. This is fair warning to anyone listening. You're going to want something maple. And that's okay. It's okay to want something maple, even if you don't have it. That's right. But if we're going to start with maple syrup, we've got to start with the maple tree. there are all kinds of maple trees and you can get sugary sap from other kinds of maple trees

but if you want the real gold and if you want the real gold standard industry-wide you're going to tap into that sweet sweet sugar maple the acer saccharum because that's the one that has the real good stuff that has the highest concentration of sugar and it's sap and like you said you might tap a red maple if that's all you got around

but you need a lot more of it to end up with what you want So you really want that sugar maple. Right. And if you say, okay, guys, I'll find a sugar maple. Where do I go? They're all over the place, actually. They have a pretty great range. We're talking about North America, Northern North America,

which includes the northeastern U.S., southeastern Canada. We're talking New Brunswick. We're talking Nova Scotia. Don't leave out Quebec because southern Quebec is far in away the largest producer of maple syrup in the world. parts of Ontario, and then Maine, all the way down in North Carolina, you can find sugar maples. There are some places that sugar maples grow that they're not going to, they're not going to make

maple syrup as much there because there's also, in addition to the actual tree itself, there are environmental conditions, climate conditions that have to take place. And they're so variable that maple syrup production and maple sugar production has resisted industrialization throughout its lifetime. And that just makes me cheer. Yeah, because it's like, you have to tap a tree that grows in the woods to do that. And I bet they've tried, but they haven't figured out a way to build a factory around a forest with trees going through it. Right.

Yeah, as far as I know, no one's tried that. Well, I guess the biodome kind of counts. Yeah, probably so. But what we're about to describe everybody is one of the wonders of nature. I didn't know anything about this stuff. So it was all new to me, and I was kind of blown away. It was kind of a mind bomb, if you will, for me. The magic to the maple syrup, obviously, is that sap.

And that sap has a very specific function in a tree. The sapwood is a part of the tree. It's also called the xylem. It's in that tree trunk just outside of the heartwood. And it has tissue in that sapwood, in the xylem, that moves water and minerals around from the roots to the leaves. It's kind of like the freeway. system, if you will. Yeah, or it's circulatory system. Hormones, too. That's what sap is. It's minerals, water, hormones, all the stuff that the tree's moving to itself to help repair wounds

and to produce photosynthesis and then also move the products from photosynthesis, which is like starches, back down to the roots, right? So you've got stuff moving up and down the tree trunk. But if you walk up to a sugar maple in the summer and you put a tap into it, it's going to to just be like this that was useless and it kind of hurt um there's a specific time when you want to tap a sugar maple to get the constituent maple sap that's right uh and that is in in the major producing parts which is what we described before uh that will be generally between like uh February and April with a peak in March and that is because and this is the second sort of astounding part of this stuff. That xylem, that sapwood, it's moving stuff all around,

but it's also really good at holding energy reserves during times where it needs it. Right. So there are these cells called Ray Perencoma that use enzymes that turn those starches, Josh was talking about, into sugars. And it's a great way to store that energy, but that sugar also protects the tissue from freezing during the winter. So it's just sort of sitting there, like in the perfect conditions waiting to be tapped in those months. Yeah, because there's this kind of positive pressure that builds up in the tree because on nights where it's freezing and that turn into days that get above freezing, right? So when the icicles start to really drip, I've seen, the sap itself starts moving up and down. And when it moves up, normally when there's leaves on the tree, transpiration or basically evaporation at the leaf surface, that relieves that pressure.

But remember, this is a time when the sugar maples don't have leaves yet. So it can't kind of relieve that pressure, and the pressure builds up and builds up. And so if you go to a sugar maple at specifically the right time, when it's freezing at night, not freezing in the day, and you put a tap into it, that's when the sap's going to come out. And like you said, those starches have been converted to sugars as energy stores. So that's also when the sap is going to be at its sweetest. There is a couple weeks that you can tap a specific kind of tree in a specific location under specific climate conditions to get the sap you're going to need to make maple syrup. And I mean, I just love maple syrup so much more than I did before. Yeah, for sure.

It's, you know, once those conditions leave, that step, it didn't dry up, but it stops running freely. If you could get to it, it wouldn't taste the same, like you said. it would be kind of bitter, but you can't get to it anyway. And this is like a seasonal cycle. Like this is when the trees are beginning to bud again. You know, like we said, it peaks in March, basically. And if you, let's say you tapped a tree and you got a little bit of that good stuff and you put it on your tongue, it wouldn't taste like the final result. It's sweet.

You can taste the sweetness, but it's about, you know, the sap ranges from about 1 to 3% of that sweetness at that. at that point. It's like it needs to be processed after that point because what you really want to get it to is a sugar concentration of about 66%. Yeah. Which means you have to boil it. You have to boil down about 40 gallons to get one gallon of syrup. Yeah, there's actually, there was this maple syrup researcher from the turn of the last century

named C.W. Jones. And he came up with what's called the Jones Rule of 86. And I'm not sure how it works. It seems a little magical. But you can take the percentage of sugar that's found in the sap naturally that you just got out of the tree and multiply that percentage by 86. And it will tell you how many gallons you need to boil down to get one gallon of maple syrup at 66% sugar concentration. That's right. And usually it's about that 40 gallon range.

People have, you know, we're not the first persons to enjoy this stuff. Like it has a very long history among indigenous North American groups. and they used it for all kinds of stuff. There's a lot of different stories like, like, you know, who's the first person to eat an oyster? Like, how do they figure out this tree sap was something you wanted? Like the first person to tap it. And it probably, no one knows for sure.

It probably happened by accident. There's a lot of stories. One of them is that there was a tomahawk in a tree. That tomahawk got pulled out. And there just happened to be a container below it that cat caught that sap. And some indigenous person was like, oh, well, let me take that water that's in this bucket from the rain and boil some meat for dinner. And they're like, wait a minute. This is like, you know, has a sweet taste to it. So it was a complete accident.

It's kind of a nice story. My money's probably on just another kind of accident. Maybe someone just sort of tasted it with their finger because a woodpecker pecked a hole in a tree. And they're like, hey, maybe we can use this something. Because they had long use saps and gums for other things. So it wasn't like any big revelation that something from a tree was useful. Sure. Yeah, totally. That's a good point. Another one, another suggestion is that somebody noticed a sapsicle and tried that

because the sugar content of the sap itself has a lower freezing point than the water. So the water separates out as it freezes. And then the sap, the sugary sap eventually freezes more with a higher concentration of sugar. And if somebody broke that off and licked it, they'd be like, Like, we need to get to the bottom of what's going on here because this is delish. I would love a real sapsicle. That'd be fun. We should also say this, so the Europeans who came over to colonize North America got this, like learned about maple syrup directly from the indigenous people who were here, like the Abinaki, the Haudenosaun, the Ojibwa, the Algonquin. and all of them had methods and techniques for getting maple sap out of sugar maple trees.

And they had like their own techniques. Each group had a slightly different technique. But ultimately what it usually boiled down to was cutting a laceration in the bark of the tree, possibly putting like a hollow twig in there to serve as the tap. Sometimes they just let it trickle down the bark of the tree. And then they would usually catch it in like a little birch bark container. the ones that I saw look like little tiny rowboats, which I bet you could use as rowboats after the sugaring season.

That's right. After they got that sap, you know, like I said, it was still, you still have to process it and boil it down. There were different techniques that they used, you know, depending what tribe you were from. But one of them most certainly was probably putting heated rocks into a container and kind of boiling and evaporating out the water that way. A lot slower process, actually.

Yeah. In fact, sometimes they would just put it over hot fire and let it happen. Sometimes they would just leave it out in the sun and take like the real slow roll approach to get the water out of there. Yeah, also they from that, I guess the sapsicle kind of thing, they figured out that you could also freeze it out. Like you could freeze the water out, remove the ice and you've just basically evaporated a bunch of water from the sap. So there was probably different techniques that could also be combined to, just to get it more and more closer to what you wanted. And we should say that the indigenous peoples of North America who were doing this pre-contact, they were not making syrup nearly as much. From what we understand, they were making this into sugar, sugar cakes, granulated sugar. They were making sugar out of the maple sap, which is essentially the same thing. you're boiling it down further than you would syrup. But you let it dry once it gets to a thicken state, you let it dry it, then you break it up and you've got maple sugar on your hands.

Specifically for one tribe, it was sort of a seasonal shift for the Ojibwe people. Like in the wintertime, they would break up into smaller groups of like a dozen or so and travel around and hunt and ice fish and stuff like that. And in the spring, they would come back together and form like these bigger communities. and that sugaring process and tapping those trees was kind of the first big thing that they did so they could, you know, store it as long as possible, hopefully all year long. And then, you know, did their other spring and summer stuff like, you know, plant and harvest and stuff like that. But sugaring season kind of kicked off of the coming back together, which is kind of cool. That's another thing I love about it is that's what it's called.

When you go and you collect the sap to make maple syrup or maple sugar from, it's called the sugaring season, the place where you boil down the saps called the sugar shack, the sugar bush. Yeah, the stand of trees of sugar maples together is called the sugar bush, kind of like a wooded area, another name for that, not the evergreen scrub bush that's found out in Chaparral country. This is just a group of sugar maples together in an area. That's your sugar bush. I just love this whole thing.

Yeah, when they would pass. pass it back and forth, they would say, give me some sugar baby. Nice. That's right. I love it. The word sugar is a very pleasing sound to my ear, so I agree. Especially.

And also when you think of the snow, I think of the snow and like the maples in the snow, like visually and then thinking of the word sugar with all that stuff too, is just, gosh. It almost makes me want to go do, like, basically move and buy like a little parcel of laying that has some sugar maples on it. And just make like a good.

gallon once a year or something like that. Seems like a lot to do just for a gallon of maple syrup that I could probably buy from somebody else for much, much, much, much cheaper and less effort. But it just seems nice, you know, like a pleasant way to be. Oh, people do that. I mean, I know in this article, Olivia said that like doing it in your house isn't super recommended because all the steam it creates from boiling it down. But I've seen videos. Like there are definitely people that tap trees on their land and just get small amounts of sugar. And like, you know, kind of like somebody might get honey from bees and set a little stand on the side of the road.

Yeah, for sure. I was looking at like a mape or sugaring, I guess, supply house. And they had like $3,400 evaporation pans that you basically put on like a propane gas, like heater or burner. And yeah, you could do it wherever. But yes, I think I would build a little sugaring shabins. or sugar shack just a woodburn into a sign to hang over the door that said sugar shack yeah and if some peyote happened to find its way in there so be it so be it we should mention before we take our break you know they were obviously eating this stuff in a lot of ways the indigenous peoples they were making cornmeal based breads with it they would put it on all kinds of like meats and fish and i imagine it tasted just so great so it was the flavor for them

but it was also a very calorie-rich thing in the early spring when their winter food was sort of dwindling. Right. And so, you know, and as we'll see later, their health properties, too. So they probably had a hunch about that as well. And don't forget the tiny rowboats that you could put in like a lake or a pond after sugar. That's right. Yeah. Let's take that break.

All right. We'll be right back and talk more about maple right after this. Pride Month, Toronto. Pride is an opportunity for you to create. your own space to celebrate your existence. Iheart Radio is proud to be an official sponsor of Pride Toronto Festival, and we won't stop. Celebrate Pride. Turn up the love and listen to IHeart Pride Canada.

Your 24-7 radio stream and the only playlist you need for your Toronto Pride celebrations. Pride is so great because it gives a whole bunch of people this visibility that they've never had before. We have a ton to celebrate Toronto. Happy Pride. Iheart Radio. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Together, we're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges.

I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Keith Giamanka seemed like a mild-mannered suburban dad, but secretly, he became someone else,

a master of disguise who went on a crime spree. At the time, did it seem like a crazy idea? It seemed very crazy, but I felt so desperate that I felt it was the quickest, easiest way out. Did you allow yourself to think about how, could go wrong on what that might look like. No, I didn't want to manifest that. I was trying to manifest success.

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maple syrup and make maple sugar for the indigenous tribes. Like that no longer did you have to put a heated rock in, in some sort of bowl with some sap and just weight. Like this, this just increased things tremendously. Yeah. I wonder if they collected in that or if they stuck to their baby boats. I hope,

I hope baby boats. That's my, that's my wish. I think so too. Uh, so early on in that colonization process, um, You know, the settlers obviously were doing the same thing, collecting it and using their methods.

It was cheaper than importing cane sugar from the Caribbean, which is where that was all coming from. And it became like the de facto sweetener of the United States at some point. And then later became a sort of a cause, an abolitionist cause. I think in the 18th century, abolitionists and Quakers were using like maple as a way to say, hey, let's not, especially founding father Benjamin Rush, like, hey, let's not support these British slave-based plantations in the Caribbean that are, we're getting this cane sugar. Like, we can get our own sweet stuff right here and export it and not promote slavery. And it tastes great.

Yeah, and that export, if you made enough to export, you could also undercut the sugar market in Great Britain back home. So you were really kind of hobbling the slave-based plantation societies by doing that. Thomas Jefferson was like, I'm on board. Let's do this because it fit into his vision of the United States being a collective of Yaoman farmers who are basically growing enough for themselves in a little a cell. They're like, yeah, just plant some sugar maples too and it'll be great. Because one of the things that makes sugaring attractive is that it takes place in this weird,

between time when there's normally not a lot to do on a family farm, now you have a whole other revenue stream and you're getting a bunch of maple syrup out of it too just by sugaring, adding that to like your yearly thing. So we did mention earlier that, you know, they probably tried to turn this into a large scale thing, but it just failed kind of time after time because it's such a labor-intensive thing. And, you know, but as a result, you know, maple, you know, I think I said at one point it was like the most common sweetener in the U.S. That kind of started falling away because it's so labor intensive and by the second half of the 19th century, cane sugar prices fell a lot and then beet sugar started being produced. So maple sugar, it just, you know, as far as

being a sweetener, kind of fell by the wayside for a long time. Yeah. But they started, you know, people still like that, that flavor, especially on things like pancakes and waffles. So they needed to to unfortunately kind of cut it with other stuff. So they, maple producer started cutting it with that cane sugar I mentioned and corn syrup. And that's where we get, you know, Mrs. Butterworth.

That's where we get that pancake syrup that we have today. I have Mrs. Butterworth written right there. I mean, what else is there? Aunt Jemima. Those are the only two. And I don't even think it's called Aunt Jemima anymore, is it?

Or is it? No, no. It's, I can't remember what they call it, like Old Mill or something like that. Yeah, yeah, they changed the name. Here's my secret.

Like, if I go to the restaurant and they have the maple syrup at the nice brunch. I love it. I'm not going to turn my nose up. And I know that's the gold. But man, I love that buttery pancake syrup. Oh, yeah, me too.

So I was thinking about what I was raised on. I didn't have real maple syrup until I was, I don't know, probably in my 40s to tell you the truth. I finally was like. Same. I want to see what this is like. And I ordered some. And I mean, it's pretty good.

But it is a different animal from what I grew up on, which wasn't even Mrs. Butterworths. My mom was like, no, that's too expensive. She would make a one-to-one simple syrup and then put a little bit of artificial maple flavoring in it. And that is maple syrup to me. And I love it still. Like that's still my favorite kind of syrup. Now when you say you ordered it, what does that mean?

Ordered it off the shelf at the grocery store? No, I ordered some online first, I think, before I noticed that you could get it at grocery store. Wow. Okay. Yeah, because I'm like organic real maple syrup, where are you going to find? find that and apparently just about everywhere. Yeah. I mean, we have that stuff around and here's what I didn't know either is that and I know Canadians and Northeastern people in the United States are probably like you guys are such rude. Oh, they're aghast right now. But hey, I grew up in Georgia.

Like this just wasn't a thing. It's not a thing down here like it is up there. So I didn't know you had to refrigerate it. So I went through the stage of like, you know, why do I have mold sports? on my maple syrup. And Mrs. Butterworth is just fine, sitting right next to it on the shelf. Yeah, I'm a little nervous about the syrup I got because it's been in my pantry for a long time and it still doesn't have mold.

So it's got like antifreeze or something cut into it. Is this stuff you ordered in your 40s? Yeah. You haven't gone through one bottle? No, I haven't because it is, it's so different from what I like or what I'm used to is maple syrup that it's like a special kind of thing. It's not what I go for now any time I'm like syrup.

Like it's a very occasional thing for me. Yeah, I'm with you, man. I definitely came onto it late. And it was definitely like in a restaurant somewhere where they, you know, had it in a little cup on the table next to me. I was like, oh, this is really good. In a cup? Like a little solo cup?

No, no, no, no, like the little medical ramekin, you know. I gotcha, I got you. Beside the waffle. So what's interesting, you kind of said that, that maple syrup production is kind of slowly but surely kind of bounced back and forth, but never really kind of gotten huge. I think we've made that point very clearly by now. But in the late 20th century, especially like I think around the 70s,

it did kind of get a boost because people were like, you know what, we can use those vacuum pumps that we use to pump milk on our family farm and plastic tubing that will just connect to the taps. And we can make this a lot easier on ourselves because if you are a traditional sugaring operation, you have pails hanging from your taps that's in the tree. And every day you have to go collect the pails and immediately start boiling it so that it doesn't grow bacteria. This is like you just kick back and let it all come to you. And it's probably going into a pretty decent size, advanced machine that's handling all of the processing for you as well. Yeah, for sure. The advent of the reverse osmosis machine became a really big deal because that was just a way more efficient way to remove water from the sap before you boil it down. So I think they can get about 90% of the water out with the reverse osmosis machine. So that really drastically reduces the boiling time to get down to that really sugary good stuff.

And the other thing is, you know, back in the day they had to use, you know, wood-fired boilers and stuff like that. Now they use propane. So lots of little things kind of came along to make it more industrial, but still not, you know, it's still trees in a forest that you're tapping. It's not like some big, like I said, like a factory built around it or something. I was reading a lot of stuff explaining how this whole thing works. And one of the sites that has some good explainers is Green's Sugarhouse. And they still use wood. Oh, really? They said they're one of the few who uses wood still.

I wonder if there's a benefit to that or just, uh, They like to be old school and tout that. I think maybe old school. I don't know. Yeah. So all of this put together, reverse osmosis, vacuum pumps, plastic tubing. When you combine it by the mid-90s, I think maple syrup production in the U.S. and Canada together increased 400% over just like a couple decades earlier. So still not industrialized, but enough now that like you can start to supply the world with maple syrup.

And that's definitely what's happening. Yeah, for sure. You know, climate change just put a dent in almost everything. And maple, the maple industry is no stranger to that, especially in the U.S., but snow cover is a pretty big deal, so it's not snowing as much. And snow cover helps insulate those roots. So that's not a great thing. The trees are also more affected by disease and invasive species that come with warmer temperatures.

and all of this has resulted in, I don't know about a consensus, but a lot of scientists are saying that, like, this may be a Canada-only thing in the not-too-distant future. Like, that range is reducing, and it's reducing northward. Right. Remember our plant migration episode? It's like that. Yeah, for sure.

So you said that the range of sugar maples is moving northward, aka plant migration. There are other things that have happened over the years with these sugar bushes. remember stands of sugar maples, that we figured out like, that's not good. We should try something different. And these family farmers basically just did something logical or like, well, let's just tear down some of these other trees

and plant more sugar maples. And so the sugar bush turned into a very, almost a monoculture, basically, where it was nothing but sugar maples. And that makes sense economically on the short term, but in the long term, it's not. good because it reduces biodiversity. Yeah, for sure. And we should mention there is another plant called a sugar bush,

but we're not talking about that just so. Save your emails. I did. I was talking, it's a chaparral plant. It's a scrub bush. Yeah. Who wants that? I guess people who like the chaparral, people who live in like 29 palms. Yeah, okay. So, you know,

biodiversity is an important part of any thriving ecosystem and sugar maples are no different. Once you simplify that tree species, you know, it's going to drive out certain kinds of birds, and those kinds of birds might be feeding on the invasive little insect critters. So they need to protect that biodiversity. So places are now sort of realizing we need to not just cut down swath of other things to plant sugar maples. And Vermont is one of them. And they enacted an effort that now requires 25% of trees in a sugar bush to be other species other than that sugar maple.

Right. Yeah. So that was nice to come full circle like that and realize like, you know, you don't want to do that. There's reasons to keep things biodiverse. I love it when nature's like, no, that's not going to work. Let's go back to how I had it before. Yeah, for sure. If you're wondering about the trees themselves, they have to be about 40 years old. So even when they were planning these things, it takes decades and decades to be able to tap them. And they have to be a certain size. They can only be about 10 inches in diameter and are generally only tapped once unless they're big mamas. If they're over 18 inches, you might be able to tap that thing a second time. Yeah, which kind of raised the question for me, not beg the question, it just raised it. Like, does it? Can you? Can you hurt? Like, does it hurt the tree when you're removing sap? Because it seems kind of sensible. Like, it's not like it naturally exudes the sap. So if you're coming along as a person and removing it, like, is the tree like, hey, I need that?

And it seems to be not the case. Yeah, that's good. I think I had that same question years ago about coal seams. If I'm not mistaken. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think I asked that on the show. I was like, I always wondered if, like, just remove. removing all of this stuff from the Earth's core is like not a great thing.

I could see that. You're leaving holes and destabilizing it. It's going to turn into Swiss cheese eventually. You know what? You might have said that 15 years ago. I probably did. Swiss cheese. But as far as the sap goes, removing it and harming the sugar maple,

that Dr. Jones from University of Vermont, who came up with the Jones Rule of 86, he did a study and estimated that something like 4 to 9 percent, of an 8 to 10 inch diameter trees, total carbohydrate reserves are removed during a sugaring season and that people don't tap trees that small. Like you said, 10 inches in diameter minimum,

so the bigger trees probably have even more reserves and lose less of a percentage. So, no, over a sugaring season, you're probably not going to tap enough sap to actually harm the tree in any way. That's great. But you did make one mistake. I believe it's pronounced,

Dr. Jones. Right? Yeah, it definitely stood out to me too, but I, uh, what's weird is I thought of Sean Connery and not Harrison Ford. Oh, interesting. Something's wrong with me. Oh, man. That's a sign of something or other.

I'm sure there's like a psychiatric test that gives you that, like a picture of Sean Connery, picture of Harrison Ford says which one's Dr. Jones and you better pick Harrison Ford or else they're going to institutionalize you. Yeah. Or, I mean, if you would have said, Shia Leboe if I would just walk into traffic after that. They don't even want to diagnose that one. No.

So we should talk a little bit about how this stuff is processed. You know, if like we mentioned sort of the home processors or if you're just a small scale producer, you're probably probably have that sugar house on your property. If you have a larger operation, you're probably collecting from nearby, but taking it to a central boiler location, like a larger sugar house, obviously. obviously. And then inside that sugarhouse, you know, evaporation is a big part of it. You know, we talked about indigenous people evaporating out all that water. You still need to do the same thing. On a small scale, I know you mentioned like the propane heater, like the turkey fryer kind of thing

that you repurposed or a wood fryer. But when you get larger, you know, it's going to be larger machines and they're, you know, they're going to be a little, they're going to have more bells and whistles on them. Yeah, you repurpose the turkey friar because you, you know, you didn't read online that you're not supposed to drop a frozen turkey in a deep fry because you almost caught your house on fire. So your partner said, no, you need to get that out into a sugar shack and make some syrup with it instead. Yeah.

And by God, please do not fry your turkey indoors either at all. Oh, good Lord. Who does that? I saw a video of a guy doing it. It's not good. Was he running it off a generator that he had indoors as well? No, no. I mean, it was a standard propane situation, but he did it like in his kitchen.

Yeah, I mean, you're going to find a video of anybody doing anything dumb these days. One other thing, we're not going to talk about them, but I urge you if you're like, I kind of like this. This sounds neat. Look up evaporator pans. They're really cool. Very cool. So something that I had no idea, it's actually kind of the fact of the podcast possibly, the flavor of maple syrup. The maple flavor itself, it's not really present very much in the sap, from what I understand.

And it's actually a result of the Mayard reaction. The same thing that turns bread into toast. Yeah. Make some duck delicious. It does all sorts of amazing things. And it's part of the, I think, the caramelization process, it gives that sap. It's maple flavor. Yeah.

We have a pretty good detailed description of that in our toast episode, which I think was quite good. So go check that one out. It was. And, by the way, we want to mention, there's a new thing on Apple podcast where if you mention something from like a past episode that I think something will now pop up on your podcast player that like tells you where that episode is which is kind of cool. Yeah, I think it has a link that you can click. Yeah.

Like Apple's done some just amazing stuff for their podcast app and player now. And it's like, yeah, I mean, hats off to them for the design and thought that they put into it. So I say go check it out. because I think we have a whole channel there now. So back to the process, though, after you have that boiling going on and get rid of that water, you're evaporating the water, you still are going to have to filter that stuff out because something's in there called sugar sand. It's like concentrated minerals and stuff and it might, you know, make it look cloudy. And this is stuff that you want to either sell on the side of the road or sell on the store. And so you're going to filter it from there.

And to me, this next thing was the fact of the podcast. If you're a fan of wine, you know that terroir is a thing where a grape growing from a certain vine out of certain soil in a certain place on earth under certain climate conditions will taste different than that same grape grown elsewhere. And that's the same thing with maple trees. It has a terroir. And if you are a highly sort of specialized maple syrup producer or a sugarer, I guess. Sugar daddy? Yeah.

Sugar daddy. You can be like well known for your particular terroir and you can charge like a lot more money. I don't know about a lot more money, but you can have like an elevated price because you have such a specialized terroar to your tree and syrup. Right. You're like, my sugar maples are fertilized only with pig feces coming from pigs that are fed 100% on a diet of organic truffles. Yeah, maybe so. You could get a lot of money for that syrup is what I understand. I think so.

So Canada is far in a way the largest exporter of maple syrup. They essentially supply the world with syrup. Yeah. I think they produce about back in 2023, Livia found $457 million worth of maple syrup Canada produced and sold. The U.S. follows at 35 million. The EU is about 13 million. but Canada makes so much maple syrup that the U.S., which produces a ton of maple syrup, still imports more than it exports or sells from Canada.

That's right. And that's just another reason that we need to stay good friends with Canada. Because they got the syrup. That's right. And we're going to be expressing that sentiment on our summer tour all across Canada. The goodwill will be flowing, hopefully tapped just like the maple syrup. Yeah, it's the dove and the olive branch tour. Quebec alone, we need to shout them out.

I know you mentioned they were the biggest producer. They produce about 72% of the world supply of maple syrup, 55 million taps going in Quebec alone. And they have what some people call a cartel in Canada. There's a government sort of endorsed industry group called the Quebec maple syrup producers, or shortened with their French name, the PPAQ, that basically acts as the go between between the 8,000 producers and the customers, and like they're really in the business.

It's not just like, yeah, we want to make sure everything's going okay, eh? They tell you how to market it, how to sell it, what to do with the reserves. Like they're really, really involved. Yeah, they're like the OPEC of maple syrup, essentially. They have a strategic reserve that they started in 2000 that can hold up the 10 million gallons. I saw them also described as a mafia by an independent syrup producer in Quebec. Because if you produce maple syrup in Quebec, it does not matter if you're a member of the PPAQ. You still have to give them a cut of your proceeds from the sale of maple syrup.

So, like, they set the prices. They can make the price artificially high, low, depending on what they want to do. And this is not to say like this is just all bad. They have done a lot of good for maple syrup producers across Quebec, but they're apparently also extremely aggressive in enforcing their rules. Yeah, I think that's the deal. Here in the United States, if you want to talk about the top producers, look no further than Vermont.

Vermont, very well known for their maple syrup. And New York State is after that. And then, you know, other New England states, but you also got to throw in oddly, maybe not oddly. Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Minnesota as other decent-sized producers. But it's really the name of the game and the U.S. is Vermont. Vermont. The old VT.

And I say we take a break, but first, we cannot not mention the PPAQ's strategic reserves and not mention the great maple syrup heist of 2011 to 2012. Yeah, take it away. Oh, okay. Well, apparently, starting in 2011, a group of thieves slowly tapped off 2,700 tons of maple syrup from barrels inside one of the PPAQ strategic warehouses. And nobody caught this for months because they either filled the barrels with water or they left them empty. But either way, the barrels were in place. So anybody walking through the

warehouse would not think anything was amiss. And it wasn't until an audit that it was found. And I think out of 27, also this whole, I think the whole thing was like $13 million. worth of maple syrup that was stolen. And they only got back 450 of the 2,700 tons. And even that, they were like, we got to destroy this because it's basically been through the ringer, you know, stolen and recovered and all that. And several people went to prison.

One of them, I think his name is Richard Valiers. He was sentenced to seven years and ten months for this, for this heist. That's how serious Quebec takes its maple syrup. All right. We'll take that second break and we'll finish up right after this. Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart.

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birch trees can produce sap other kinds of maple trees I mentioned can produce sap you're probably not going to make that into maple syrup you're probably using it for making like an additive like making beer making vinegar maybe as something in a drink

I know there's a pretty rich tradition in South Korea of their native maple tree the Gorosso tree where they I mean this sounds dangerous to me they get together in a hot room and drink like five gallons each of this stuff? Yeah, each. That sounds like, like,

how about that amount of intake of liquid would kill you? Well, essentially, it's supposed to do the opposite, that it's like a health tonic, essentially, and then the sauna action, you're sweating out toxins, and you're replacing it with this healthful sap. But, I mean, if they've been doing it for this long and people aren't keeling over,

at the very least, it's not harmful. I just wonder how many, how long that is, Like over what period of time? I don't know. Five gallons of anything. That's what I'm saying. Like five gallons of water will kill you, own it? Yeah.

I think you can toxify. But yeah, they've been doing it for a long time. Northern China also drinks the sap of certain kinds of maple trees. But, you know, outside of Europe, there are places in the United States like the Pacific Northwest where they're tapping big leaf maples. The thing is you just need a lot more, about twice as much, actually, to get a gallon of syrup because it's just not as sugar. Right. And here's the other thing, too, that not only do they need a lot more to produce the syrup, but it doesn't have that same kind of climate consistency as far as like freezing every night and getting warm the next day. So it's sort of between November and March, it seems like, and maybe if you're someone out there doing this, you can correct me, but it seems like it's tap as available, sort of. So you've got a bunch of syrup on your hands. You followed all of the processing tips. that we gave you.

Time was that your maple syrup would be assigned a grade, one of three grades. Fancy, A, or B? Fancy was like the most delicate, B's the most robust, but people didn't understand that. They thought fancy was the best. Like cats up, right? You think cats up is much better than ketchup because it's fancy. That's not the case. So they changed it.

Now it's all grade A, but then they assign different categories based on the flavor and the color of it. That's right. They have golden amber, dark and very dark, and that ranges, uh, respectively as delicate, rich, robust and strong.

Yeah. Um, the very dark, the strongest one, you're probably going to be cooking with that. Uh, the lightest, that golden, delicate one,

maybe, uh, putting it in a cocktail or something, like the stuff that you buy off the grocery store shelf or get ordered, I guess, to be delivered, to live on your home shelf forever.

Mm-hmm. For your pancakes and waffles, that's going to be that amber maple syrup. Right. And then there's other stuff, too, like say you didn't get the sugar sand out and it's cloudy or it has a slightly off taste, like maybe you sugared a little too late in the season. That's graded. It's not an A grade and they don't sell it in the stores. Instead, it's graded as maple syrup for processing.

And so if you have like a maple taste in some industrially produced commercially available food, it's that kind of maple syrup. So if you've ever had waffle crisp cereal in the 90s, you were eating maple syrup for processing. That's right. I did mention the refrigerator. If you don't open it, you can keep it on that shelf for about three years,

but afterward you apparently do need to refrigerate it and it can go for another three years. It's that high sugar content, basically, that's keeping it nice and pristine. But, you know, as happened to me, once you open that stuff, it can get little mold spores. Yeah, I've got to go check mine because I really don't think it's molded. But let's say that you want something besides syrup.

You're just so syruped out. You drank five gallons of it and you want something other than the syrup. What are you going to turn to, Chuck? Well, I know everyone's seen those little maple leaf shaped candies. Adorable. At a rest stop in New England. And I'm sure all over Canada. but yeah, they're usually shaped like little maple leaves.

They heat that stuff up and pour it into molds to cool down. It can be like a softer light-colored thing depending on how hot you get it or that dark, hard candy. And I've had those. Those are delicious. Yeah. There's also maple cream, which is essentially whipped maple syrup. Oh, baby. Yeah.

And there's something called sugar on snow, where you take a pack of snow packed together, which is why they call it a pack. and you pour boiling syrup onto it, and it immediately congeals into like a caramel consistency, and you basically eat it like a candy. Sometimes they put it on like a popsicle or a sucker stick. Yeah, that sounds pretty good. We've got to mention to all our New England friends. I don't know if they have these in Canada,

but the maple creamy is like a soft serve ice cream. And of course, at any local county fair, you're going to get your maple cotton candy or a Quebec specialty, the delicious maple syrup pie. I'm going to try that when we're in Montreal for sure. Me too. I'm also going to try to find some maple sugar there too. Apparently, when you bake with it, you can substitute,

I've seen one for one or three quarters for one, with white granulated sugar in your recipe. And especially if you're making something fall like, like a banana bread or apple pie or something like that, it apparently just steps up. the flavor quite a bit. Yeah. Oh, and I know last year I mentioned my maple old-fashioned.

Oh, yeah. Which is now my kind of go-to sweetener for my old-fashioned. It's really yummy. Well, you should try some maple sugar in there, man. Instead of the syrup? No, I mean, you make the syrup with sugar, right? Oh, no, I just put syrup in there. But what do you make the syrup from, is what I'm saying?

From the bottle off the shelf at Publix. Oh, I thought you made your own. And we gave people like a whole recipe, didn't we? No, no, no, no. That was a pumpkin spice syrup that I made. You should use maple sugar and that then. Yeah, okay. Good call.

But I use maple syrup right out of the bottle for my other favorite old fashion. Very nice. At public sign, you don't order it. No, just go to the store, get it like a sucker. So you mentioned that it actually has some nutritional value, right? Yeah. I saw that it has 95% of your daily value of manganese. Like, beat that.

Yeah. What does manganese do for you? Everything. 37% of your daily value of riboflavin, which is B-Vitium, vitamin. Also has potassium, which is why I said vitium, calcium, zinc, loads of antioxidants, apparently, and it has a lower glycemic index score than sugar by far. So it spikes your blood sugar much less than sugar does. Yeah, for sure.

And they have evidence that some of the compounds from maple syrup can enhance the effectiveness of antibiotics. Yeah. And that's and that's maple syrup, which means it's time for listener mail. All right. This is a quick note from Kyle Metzger. Kyle says, hey, guys, I was recently listening to the old episode from 2018 on the Concord. Hey, we just mentioned another old episode. So that'll probably pop up on your little Apple player.

the way. Nice. In my ongoing quest to simultaneously listen to the back catalog as well as new episodes. So Kyle, you are sandwiching, my friend. That's the right way to do it, I think. Nice. He said, Josh, you are continually amazed that the Concord fuel was kerosene, as that was very primitive or old school, but actually, almost all

jet fuel is kerosene, and has been since its inception. Basically, its two uses are jet fuel and household cooking and lighting fuel. Wanted to keep this one short and sweet guys. Love you too. And love you two, and Love the show. Short and sweet, very appropriate for our maple syrup episode, Chuck. That's right.

That was Who Metzger? Kyle. Hey, Kyle. Thanks a lot for that. We appreciate it. No idea that kerosene's been jet fuel forever. So thanks for that. And if you want to be like Kyle and send us an email that I say thanks for that about,

you can send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, Visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Joy is essential, and it's also elusive, but now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotby. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air chats.

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