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During your next visit to a local farmer’s market, see if there are any maple syrup purveyors in your area.Acer circinatum, the vine maple, is a species of maple native to western North America. The lower sugar content makes the process take longer than out East, which does result in a higher price tag. For three months, hundreds of hours are spent cleaning taps and buckets, tapping trees, collecting sap, boiling sap, and filtering and bottling syrup.

This results in “froggy” sap (foggy, discoloured) and a funny taste, and that’s when we know the season is over, and it’s time to pull the taps and pack them away for another year.Īny West Coast maple syrup producer is likely to agree that making the sticky, sweet treat is truly a labour of love. The trees will start budding, which draws chlorophyll into the sap to feed the leaves. But while the months may be different, the same rules apply for knowing when the season is ending. On the Island, because of our mild climate and early springs, the sap flows for syrup from December/January to about March, whereas out East, they begin tapping in late February, as we’re winding down. The syrup season months also differ between the West Coast and the East Coast. Syrup in glass bottles, when unopened, won’t expire and will last indefinitely, and even when opened, can last a year or longer in the fridge. We carefully monitor it until it reaches 66☋rix, at which point we pour and squeeze the hot syrup through a cheesecloth filter and bottle it in glass or tin bottles. When the sap reaches about 50☋rix, we move the syrup inside the house to finish the boiling process. My father-in-law spends entire days on this part of the process, feeding the fire every few minutes for hours on end-because once the sap has left the tree, it only has a few days it can sit before boiling without going bad. The fire needs to be stoked continuously to maintain a consistent boil. We pour the sap into the pans and begin the long boiling process. This is a long metal contraption featuring a wood-fired oven and two large pans on top. Once we’ve carefully collected the sap each day, we bring it to our sugar shack, with its waiting evaporating pan. (It takes all the containers of sap in this photo to make about one container of maple syrup!) (In order to legally be considered maple syrup, that sugar content number is 66%-or, in syrup maker lingo, 66☋rix.) This extra boiling time can result in a thicker, darker and stronger syrup flavour.

This means the sap potentially boils for much longer to reach the appropriate sugar content level to be considered maple syrup. But in the West, we tap bigleaf maples, which have a significantly lower sugar percentage at 1–2 %, or up to 80 litres of sap for one litre of syrup. This means it takes about 40 litres of sap to make one litre of syrup. The maples in the East, where we get the majority of our maple syrup from, are sugar maples, and the sugar content of their sap is up to about 4%. This is because of the types of maple trees used. While this sap may look like water, each drop is precious, as it takes a lot of sap to make West Coast maple syrup. Between my in-laws, my husband and I, we hop on quads and cruise around the woods through mud, snow, rain and sunshine, collecting the water-like liquid (literally, it just looks and tastes like water at this point) to bring it back to our “sugar shack.” Depending on the weather, some days provide little to no sap, while other days can offer up to 16 litres or more per tree. Because each day from here to the end of the season, we check the buckets to ensure they don’t overflow. In my opinion, this is the easiest part of making maple syrup. This tapping process is repeated a couple of times throughout the season, as the holes slowly grow over. We drill two inches into the trees at a slight upward angle, then push in a tap with a small hose that leads to a container. Over the years, this hobby morphed into a full-fledged business, so now, every January, we head into the woods laden with drills, taps, hoses and buckets. But after my prairie-born self married my Island-grown husband and we moved to the Comox Valley, it wasn’t long before he was pulling out taps and tubes and buckets and indoctrinating me into the ways of making maple syrup on the West Coast. If you’re like me, you might not have previously known there was a burgeoning maple syrup industry on Vancouver Island.

It’s the beginning of maple syrup season, and I’m wandering around my husband’s parents’ acres of wooded forest, tapping hundreds of bigleaf maple trees. It’s a crisp January day the frost is lingering on the trees and every step emits a satisfying crunching sound as puddles of ice break beneath my feet.