How do they make Maple Syrup from tree sap?

Question

You have to do something more to get it then just milk a tree right? So how does sap become syrup?

Answer 1

This link explains how maple syrup is made very well, much better than other more complicated explanations you might find in an online encyclopedia or other similar websites. It is much too long to just copy and paste.

Answer 2

very carefully

Answer 3

The sap is boiled for a long period of time until it reduces to a syrup.  Tasty stuff.  One Canadian backwoods treat is to take the fresh syrup and roll it in snow to make  a frozen sweet.

Answer 4

All you need to do is tap a tree.

According to Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_Syrup

"Traditionally, maple syrup was harvested by tapping a maple tree through the bark and into the wood phloem, then letting the sap run into a bucket, which required daily collecting; less labour-intensive methods such as the use of continuous plastic pipelines have since superseded this, in all but cottage-scale production."

Normally, several kinds are mixed along with preservative and other food additives to make it a commercial syrup, but you can hold your pancakes right under the tree sap tap and get your syrup direct from the tree.  It will be sweet enough and taste good.

Sap is like the blood stream to a tree and through the process of photosynthesis chlorophyll uses light, carbon dioxide and light to make sugar giving off water and oxygen as waste.  The tree uses the sugar to fuel its growth processes.

Answer 5

Don't listen to Dan and wikipedia. This is how syrup is made:

Maple syrup comes from the sap of maple trees. In the early spring, if you cut the bark of (or drill a hole into) certain species of maple trees, clear sap will leak from the cut. This sap is very thin -- almost like water -- but it contains about 2-percent sugar (sucrose). If you boil this watery sap to drive off the water, you eventually get maple syrup. It takes 30 or 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple pancake syrup. One tree might yield 10 gallons (38 liters) of sap over the course of four weeks.