Last year we managed to burn about a dozen cord of wood in the process of making 520 gallons of maple syrup. We’ll have a total between 30 and 40 cord by the time we’re done. Might be enough for two years, then again, maybe we’ll get some folks sending us some additional sap.

I’ll be heading up to Vershire tomorrow morning to pick up some old tin roofing a friend is setting aside as he takes down a falling farmhouse on his woodlot. Will be sure to stock him up with a good amount of maple syrup. This tin will go atop the split and stacked wood. It’s just about the best thing to help dry it out. The wood starts off about 40 percent water when it’s split. By the time it’s dry enough for my tastes, it’s gone down to between 15 and 17 percent water – about as low as wood can go in Vermont’s outdoor air. We had a doohickey with long prongs you could stick in the end of a log to tell its moisture level. It was sitting out until a friend’s twin boys came by and started to try to test each other’s moisture levels. Turns out they’re both about 85 percent water incidentally, which makes sense, as they’re twins.

In retrospect, the number of gallons of maple syrup we made last year relative to the wood we burned indicates that our pre-concentration of the sap isn’t as strong as I’d like it to be. Suggests we’re concentrating the maple sugar in that fluid only between 2 and 3 times. We’d much rather see between 5 and 6 times concentration, as that’s where we’ve been able to show consistently that the flavor remains the same after going through our reverse osmosis machine. Just for the sake of argument, if we did concentrate by 6x, then the wood we have on hand could make more than 4,000 gallons of maple syrup, if you could find the sap. That gets the mind going.

The boil we did do, though, was a doozy, with steam coming out in clouds, the wind taking it in all directions, once sending it down Tucker Hill Road and around the hairpin corner, as though it were the ghost of a bus.

[Nice, Controlled Boil]

[Massive, Violent Boiling, Obscuring Smokestack, with Cackling in Background]

The sap coming out of the trees is getting a bit long in the tooth, showing a bit cloudy. This means that the sap has a different proportion of different types of sugars, makes for darker maple syrup and will soon start throwing off-flavors that will end our season. So far, however, the flavor is great. We’ll keep tasting each batch to see when it turns. At least that’s our excuse.

[Our Larger Sap Collection Tank on a Hot Day; Note the Cloudiness]

More typically, we see some very small crystals form in the bottom.

I am looking for some help in my own attempt at maple sugaring. This is the first time we have ever attempted this, and the syrup we produced has a very off flavor. Almost like rotten fruit? Any tips? -Tara

There are a few things that can cause these off flavors in maple syrup. I’ll list them out, and perhaps one or two will jump out at you.

Perhaps the most common cause of such an off flavor is boiling sap that has been kept too long before boiling, or stored in a warm and/or concentrated form. I made some very nice rotten fruit maple syrup a year ago on my last day, concentrating some sap partially and then letting it sit up in the sugarhouse attic for three days getting nice and toasty in the April sun before doing my last boil. Specifically, it tasted like rotten oranges. I sacrificed that batch to the farmyard as an offering for a good maple syrup season in 2009.

Remember that while bacteria are breeding in your sap, they’re eating your sugar and excreting compounds that are generally not good for the maple syrup flavor. The specific type of critters you have growing can vary, and their off-flavors will vary along with them. We’re contemplating installing an ultra-violet filtering system on our sap and concentrate tanks next year, so as to be able to more comfortably store sap and boil more strategically. For the backyard sugarer, that wouldn’t make any sense at all. You might, though, contemplate whether or not you really want to hold over sap from Monday’s buckets to the Saturday during which you have time to boil.

Sometimes, rather unpredictably, maple trees will go through a “metabolism” stage, where it will generate an off-flavored sap. When that happens, it’s usually not a local phenomenon, and can be seen across an area. I haven’t had this happen to me, but a few years back a lot of New England maple syrup producers found this happening, and they reported that the maple syrup had a distinct “sweaty sock” taste. Makes your mouth water just thinking about it. Proctor Maple Research Center is in the midst of some good research on this phenomenon. They’re trying to pin down both the cause and any actions a sugarmaker might take in order to prevent or correct the problem.

I have a few local folks who just started maple syruping coming by the sugar shack this year, showing off some samples of Fancy maple syrup. That’s impressive, given that it’s tough to make fancy off a stovetop, but it’s also fairly common for the light and subtle taste of fancy maple syrup to reveal the presence of pan cleaner residue, or even of odors baked into the sap while boiling, such as cigarette smoke or just plain not-very-well-vented firebox smoke. With the sometimes fruity taste of fancy maple syrup, those off-flavors can combine to give a rotten fruit sort of flavor.

Finally, we’ve seen different sorts of areas in New England throw different maple syrup flavors. Our bush behind our house, for instance, throws a vanilla-like maple syrup flavor. The bush we rent over in Strafford, the town next door, has an intense “put-hair-on-your-chest” maple maple syrup flavor. This past year, my wife held a maple syrup tasting with author Amy Trubek, the author of “Taste of Place.” We had a couple dozen folks in Norwich tasting maple syrup from different regions, and it was quite stark how they had different flavors, ranging from the woody to the fruity. You may find that you have trees that throw a particular flavor. If it really tastes like rotten fruit, it is likely that boiling the sap more quickly, keeping it cool when not boiling and finishing the syrup to a good thickness will make the flavor seem a benefit rather than a problem. Please do let us know if any of this sounds relevant, and if you find your maple syrup is able to shed the off flavor.

One element I’ve been thinking about: if we’re boiling down extra strong, the sugar content of that syrup is obviously higher than normal. A New Hampshire syrup might be below 68 percent sugar. A Vermont syrup should be just above 68 percent. We’ll pack it at about 70 or so. But when the sugar comes out of solution like this, folks say it’s just back to normal syrup. Except, I think it’s not. You see, those sugar crystals don’t taste like maple syrup. They’re just pure sugar. Which means that all the extra maple flavor associated with that volume of syrup remains in the bottle. Here is a picture of the same bottle in the evening…

[This is, quite literally, stored energy]

I need to test this more carefully, but I believe that a bottle of overstrength maple syrup that has been brought back to normal strength through sugar crystals forming will have a higher rate of maple syrup flavor than a bottle that was just brought to normal density in the first place. We could probably best test this with some Grade A Fancy, where the normal strength maple syrup lacks the strong flavor of the darker grades of maple syrup. Sounds like a great excuse to do another tasting.

[Visitors can't help themselves]

We didn’t make much maple syrup. The wind knocked down the sap flow in the second half of the day. We took in about 600 gallons of new sap, putting most of that sugar into the pans, and not drawing off much – perhaps three gallons of maple syrup. Once this arch starts rollicking along, it’ll be throwing about 10 gallons of maple syrup per hour of maple syrup.

To get that to happen, we need our reverse osmosis machine working, and that’s been a bit of a chore. Ours, you see, is about as old as I am, and a lot crankier. Today it exhibited three distinct personalities, behaving very differently with the same control settings. I think we’re past a plumber, and we need either a psychologist or an exorcist. But it wouldn’t be maple syruping if we weren’t breaking something expensive.

[The culprits]

Fake maple syrup is typically made with sugar, some sort of chemical thickener, and – here’s the key ingredient – a spice called fenugreek. Fenugreek is the Zelig of spices. In slightly different forms, concentrations and mixtures, it can serve as the key flavor of a spicy curry or taste and smell sort of like maple syrup. The likeness to maple syrup, though, is dependent on just the right concentration. Taking a taste of this flavoring in concentrated form is a nauseating experience. Worse, once you do this, any time you taste fake maple syrup, that too can become somewhat nauseating.

[Dried fenugreek seeds far, far from home]

I tasted the three of these bottles, and another one not shown, and I started to feel queasy. Only when I left the room, and could no longer imagine I smelled it, did I feel better. The fenugreek flavor, now seared into my mind, is what comes to my tongue first when tasting fake maple syrup products. This is not a desirable talent. My wife and I were recently at one of the nicer restaurants in Stowe, and I couldn’t eat but two or three spoonfuls of a maple syrup pudding that – to me – tasted like curry. My wife, it should be noted, thought the sugaring thing has finally cracked me and that I’ve become paranoid. That said, she declined to exchange her chocolate pastry with my choice.

People who don’t know maple syrup flavor well may confuse the taste and smell with maple syrup. New Yorkers have been doing this for years , living downwind from spice production facilities based in New Jersey.

For a future blog post, I’ve been collecting pricing data across the U.S. for maple syrup. Interestingly, when I call these stores, sometimes the clerk doesn’t know there’s a difference between “real maple syrup” and Aunt Jemima’s. When I wind up talking to one of these folks, I collect the fake maple syrup pricing data, and it’s proved rather interesting. The fake maple syrup costs about $28 per gallon. No one realizes that because it’s sold generally in 8.5 ounce or 12.5 ounce bottles. The real maple syrup typically sells in supermarkets and local stores for about $100 per gallon – again, that expensive due mostly to the small sizes offered for sale.

Someone buying one of these flavorings pictured above (the several I tested were pretty radically different from one another in flavor intensity and quality) could manufacture their own fake maple syrup for roughly $15 to $20 per gallon, depending on the type of non-maple sugar used. God save their souls.

Theories abound on these sites as to why there seems to be a periodic wafting across the island. Not known for stoicism, New Yorkers have been calling municipal information and even emergency lines asking what’s up, some suspecting a chemical attack. It led to one of my favorite New York Times headlines: “Good Smell Perplexes New Yorkers.”

Trying to track down the source NYC blog Gothamist created a Google Maps mash-up of reported sightings, pictured below, sadly using Mrs. Buttersworth bottles as an icon. Which helps explain some things…

The likely answer to their puzzle is the fact that the same primary ingredient in fake maple syrup flavoring is fenugreek, the same spice used to make curries and other strong-flavored ethnic foods.

Here’s the deductive reasoning, which – upon reflection – sounds sort of like one of those gritty New York City crime show endings…

- It’s unlikely that the average New Yorker could tell the difference between a real maple syrup smell and something approximating a maple syrup smell.

- Once one person posts a comment on a blog in NYC, it’s axiomatic that several tens of people will make some sort of self-referential comment, in this case probably triggering a wave of smell observations.

- The key ingredient to fake maple syrup flavoring is fenugreek, a seed used more commonly as a key spice in curry.

- An internet search turns up listings for 17,107 Indian restaurants in New York City, or about one for every 400 people.

- New York is so densely populated each individual takes up only about 1,000 square feet of land space, or about a 30′x30′ area.

- That means that the average surface area commanded by a particular Indian restaurant is roughly 10 acres.

- This all means that it’s probably difficult to NOT smell fenugreek in New York City roughly around dinner time (a time that seems to correspond to the reports)

To put it in perspective, even here in Thetford Center, VT, with a population of 2,800, if we had the same density of indian restaurants per person, we would have roughly seven of them (which would be a fine thing in my book). They would each command 3,000 acres of land, and being at the population centers would likely cover the majority of the population with fenugreek smells. Except we’d know the difference.

Here is a picture of a maple syrup bottle consumed slowly over a year, leaving a residue of maple sugar crystals…

Interestingly, we’ve been polling people over the 2008 to see whether they prefer thicker, “normal” or thinner maple syrup. The vast majority of people said they preferred the standard thickness. One or two said thinner, and perhaps a quarter said thicker. This surprised me, as I assumed everyone would prefer thicker maple syrup over the norm.

When asked both if they knew their preferences well and whether they liked lighter or darker maple syrup, the folks who indicated they knew their preferences mostly said darker maple syrup, perhaps by a 2-1 ratio. The people who indicated that they weren’t confident in their preferences were more apt – but not by much – to say lighter maple syrup. This is consistent with studies done by maple research centers, although I have not seen them couch their questions with the information about how confident the respondents are in their various answers.

A before and after shot of the bottles of overstrength maple syrup.

The maple syrup bottles above are a recent gift to some in-laws, next to the bottle just recently finished off from last year’s gift. Some customers see the maple sugar crystals growing in glass containers and assume that it must be some sort of organic growth. I find that they express this concern particularly when maple sugar just starts to come out of solution, as the early crystals look an awful lot like a fuzz on the inside bottle surface, and sometimes floating just under the maple syrup’s surface.

I am not sure about this, but I suspect that overstrength maple syrup is less friendly to growths because of its lower than normal water ratio. Typically, growths in maple syrup happen only in the thin layer of water at the top of the bottle, often resulting from condensation.

I replied that it is, and that by indicating “Vermont maple syrup” on the label, it’s required to be both. But I also realized that most maple users aren’t familiar with the terms, and the profusion of various labels actually does the industry a bit of a disservice by causing uncertainty.

Here’s the upshot:

- You want to make sure the maple syrup you buy is just maple syrup, and not some maple-flavored corn syrup concoction. If you get the cane sugar or corn syrup variety of syrups, you might as well just use store-bought cane sugar. It’ll taste pretty much the same and serve your sweetening needs. It will not, however, contain the soulful flavor of the sap that runs through trees at the break of winter.

- If the label says “Vermont maple syrup,” you’re fine. There’s actually a nice fellow here in Vermont whose job it is to go around trying syrup and making sure that no one is selling an adulterated product. Syrup from other states can probably be trusted if it has on it the label “100 percent pure.” This fellow who wrote in today taught me a lesson, and I’ll probably add that language onto our next batch of labels, with the expectation that most people can’t be bothered to know all this.

- Speaking of the different states, I have to relate an old story handed down about the sugarers in the different northern New England states. Back in the heyday of buckets, people would once in a while find a red squirrel drowned in sap when they came to collect from the trees. The story goes that in Maine, the sugarer would throw out the sap and the squirrel, wash the bucket and then set it back up. In New Hampshire, sugarers just throw out the squirrel and keep the sap. In Vermont, the sugarer throws out the collects the sap and makes sure to remember to wring out the squirrel to get the last drop. Of course, I’ve heard this story with any combination of those and other states in various orders. It’s considered politic to use your own state as the punchline.

- Back in the 1870s, syrup grades made a lot of sense. Ever since then, they haven’t. Back during the Civil War, people up here used maple sugar as their primary sweetener, having lost access to most of their cane sugar supply, and it being so expensive to ship it great distances. As a result, the most flavorless syrup – the lightest – was the most highly valued. This was the basis for our current grades, with Grade A Fancy being the least flavorful. The different states have slightly different terms for the grades, but you can use Vermont’s as the basic model: Grade A Fancy, Grade A Medium Amber, Grade A Dark Amber, Grade B, Commercial. The further you go along that list, the darker the syrup (in fact, as of now grade is determined solely by color). Usually, the further you go along that list, the more flavorful the syrup. Most people find that in taste tests they prefer something close to Medium Amber or Dark Amber, as they are quite flavorful, but not quite so strong as the others, which can often also have caramel and other “off flavors.” In another post, I’ll deal with the fact that new technology has broken the link between color and flavor, but for now suffice it to say that people paying more for Fancy syrup are more often not getting what they would prefer, were they to know the difference. This is one reason why prices for Fancy syrup, once at a premium, are just about equal to most of the lower grades.

(This is medium amber held to the light)

- TillinghastMaple.com has been conducting a rolling poll of people’s preferences for syrup grades and thicknesses. People who indicate that they feel they know their favorite most often choose Medium Amber. In most years, the vast majority of our syrup produced is Medium Amber and Dark Amber. As the season rolls along, syrup tends to get darker as it is produced, in part because of metabolism reactions in the tree sap and in part because of the collected carbon and other elements collecting on equipment as it is used through the season.

- Different regions have different syrup flavors, but my own informal research into this seems to show that very local conditions and production methods produce these flavors. I don’t find that a particular region of a state has a consistent flavor, but rather that individual sugar producers have consistently different flavors, and that these flavors may or may not be different from those produced by their neighbors. As a syrup shopper, you should try several different syrups over time and home in on the ones you prefer best. If you’re not buying syrup from multiple places each year, to have side-by-side tests, then you’re just never going to see this wonderful variation. For the record, my favorite syrup isn’t produced by me. There’s a fellow in the town next door named Gerard Stevens whose syrup would, in the words of my grandfather “put hair on your chest.”