More Science

Note the stuff at the bottom of the jar. It's maple salts.

I guess you can take the scientist out of the lab, but you can't take the scientist out of the person. As in the movie Sixth Sense where the little boy confesses, "I see dead people," (and btw, so do I -- but that is another post), I see science, especially when we are sugaring. Today, it's the effect temperature has on solubility. When I put the finished syrup (temperature 221 degrees for our location) into the canning jars it is bell ringing clear, but as the syrup cools, it gets cloudy. This stuff miraculously appears in the jar.

No miracle really, for as the syrup is cooling, what is appearing is maple salts. Maple sap is more than just sugar, water and nature's own maple flavoring. It contains all the nutrients the tree needs to grow, flower, and develop leaves. These nutrients are lumped together into one category, as far as the sugarmaker is concerned -- maple salts.

Hot syrup, most hot liquids for that matter, have a higher capacity to solubilize salts than there cooler counterparts. This is what we see every spring.

The larger sugarshacks filter their maple syrup after finishing. Our yields are so small, (sometimes only a quart after a boil) in comparison that we would lose a lot of our product (maple syrup) to the filter. So we let nature and time do the separation process.