The recent bout of frosty weather may have helped to extend the coast’s small maple syrup industry this year.
Unlike syrup producers down east, who look forward to warmer temperatures in late winter to get their trees’ sap flowing, B.C. producers need the reverse — cooler temperatures. In both regions, optimal conditions for tapping maple sap are those that range from –5 C to 5 C — just below freezing at night and just above during the day.
The difference is that range is positively balmy for easterners and witheringly cold for wimpy southwest coasters. Witness the closure of some municipal recreation centres and suspension of bus service last Tuesday morning, when local temperatures plummeted (!) from 3.5 C to barely 0 C.
Grade 4 science teaches that water expands when it freezes. If organisms’ water-filled cells freeze, the cells burst and die.
Maple trees survive temperature swings by adjusting the water content in their living tissues. In cold weather, cells in the trees’ living tissues dehydrate, preventing freezing. When temperatures rise above 0 C, water moves back into the cells.
This rush to rehydrate desiccated cells creates a pressure difference that draws additional water — sap — up from the trees’ roots.
Back east, seesawing temperatures happen as winter turns to spring. On the West Coast, freezes and thaws are less predictable. Our maples, on the other hand, are tapped whenever the weather warms after a frosty patch, and that can occur at any time from late November to March.
In some years, B.C. syrup producers might start tapping their trees in December, while down the road, others might start in January. The season might last a few days here and there, or several weeks. It comes down to local microclimates and conditions.
By mid-March, tapping season is finished, and our maples bud and leaf out in April.
The Island’s maple syrup industry differs from eastern counterparts in other ways. Theirs goes back centuries.
In 1609, French author, poet and lawyer Marc Lescarbot, who had travelled to what was then the Maritimes, wrote in his Histoire de la Nouvelle France, “If [Indigenous people] are pressed by thirst, they get juice from trees and distil a sweet and very agreeable liquid.”
Colonial settlers adopted that traditional ecological knowledge for their own purposes, boring holes in maple trees in the spring, collecting sap and boiling it down.
The eastern industry is extensive and well established. Quebec’s syrup industry supplies 80 per cent of the world’s maple syrup.
Here, the industry is about 20 years old.
Eastern Canada and U.S. also have their native sugar maple tree, the primary source of the delectable breakfast treat.
Our industry focuses on the bigleaf maple, which is native to the 91原创 Northwest. Bigleaf maples grow in low to middle elevations from the 91原创 coast to about 300 kilometres inland, from San Diego to 91原创 Island.
It is the only western maple that reaches commercial — and tap-able — size.
For years, it was believed bigleaf maples don’t produce palatable syrup. Small farmers, woodlot owners and researchers at the universities of British Columbia, Victoria, and Washington have since shown otherwise.
Producing syrup from the bigleaf maple is not only possible, the resulting syrup has more of a butterscotch and intense flavour than the usual maple syrup.
Furthermore, syrup can be produced from the sap of many different maple species, as well as some other hardwood species.
An Okanagan-based syrup outfit successfully tapped Norway and other imported maples growing in the Summerland area a few years ago, while a few producers in B.C.’s Cariboo region (and in Manitoba) make birch syrup.
Another east-west difference: Sugar maples have higher concentrations of sugar in their sap — as much as four per cent.
Sap from bigleaf maples typically contains just one per cent sugar. This means considerably more sap and more evaporation and cooking are needed to create one litre of syrup.
Taken together, it means that bigleaf syrup is more artisanal, much harder to find, and more expensive than regular maple syrup when you do find it.
