This time of year, when the nights are still below freezing but the days are now warming up above freezing, maple syrup tapping season. Maple syrup itself comes in different grades of quality that are distinguished not only by the clarity of the syrup, but the by the taste that is tinted by almost a burnt flavor in the lower grades. You can see the samples in this photo of the various grades that can be collected and processed.
For the last several hundred years, this has been an enterprise here in New England, where tubes were tapped into trees and collected into buckets for the collection of sap that is made into the kind of syrup that is distinctly maple.
Up until as recent as around 1985, buckets were still being used to collect maple sap. Reminiscent of a time more nostalgic time, where winter was marked by sleds, and wool mittens, and ice fishing, this photo shows the end of winter and welcoming of spring when collection of buckets, depending on the size of the enterprise, could range from a few taps to several hundreds.
But now technology has allowed tubing to attached to a network of trees and vacuum assistance helps in pulling the sap from trees into a main line, similar to tributaries adding to the flow of a river that winds itself down to the ocean.
The main sap line is a conduit that allows the collected sap to be brought to the processing shed where it is boiled and purified to its different grades. Maple syrup season runs until Spring time and is marked with the budding of the maple trees, which if tapped, taint the syrup with a bitter taste.
