You Know Your Maple Syrup’s Thick When…
by Tig Tillinghast
We’ve made some pretty thick batches of maple syrup. This is probably the largest sugar crystal-to-maple-syrup-volume ratio I’ve seen in one of our bottles. This is a 500 ml bottle, with a rock sugar crystal at the bottom that might be more than 5 percent of the original volume of the maple syrup. It was from the 2007 vintage and sat in a cool dark closet for a couple years. 
More typically, we see some very small crystals form in the bottom.
Comments
That looks like a great nugget. You should use some of it to conduct your test about sugar crystals. You can melt this down and use a your Refractormeter to see what the sugar content is. If it is higher than maple syrup than you can infer that it extracts sugar from maple syrup (or evaporation). If you find that there is no syrup content then you can infer that it does not increase the maple syrup’s sugar content (made from the water in the syrup, or other strange things). If it turns out to be the same it’s no problem to remelt it when they form.
I use the word infer as this is not quite a scientific test but it might lead you in the right direction. I assume that a big sugar crystal is at least partially sugar.
I am curious about the effect remelting these crystals causes to the syrup.