Ha ha. Yes the same as in Croatia. Only I have never seen someone jump like that around a pancake. Are you supposed to eat it the same way?
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Kristijan,
Until you taste homemade syrup you cannot tell. Comparing the blended warehoused, often cut down store bought stuff to Maple syrup would be the same as comparing your local honey to that horrible bear jar honey. Real maple syrup is more of a caramel then a simple reduction due to the heavy boil that is traditional. In recent years as reverse osmosis has taken hold commercially the taste has changed the RO removes up to 80 percent of the water before heat is added so very little boil time. Add in the modern evaporators keep the sap a single degree above boiling and it makes for a more sweet less flavourful product. That is what gets sold abroad. Then the vast majority of syrup is lowland stuff which produces a lot of sugar but without the deep flavours. I’m a mountain boy so our maples grow in rock in harsh conditions which makes them less productive but much more rich in taste. I boil mine a little thicker as well then standard… Sorry I grew up in Rural Quebec where syrup is more of a religion then a business…
Cheers, David
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David thanks for the first hand experience with RO syrup. I haven’t had any made that way. If I am going to pay for it I want the old school thick stuff which is usually considered B grade. I also want to actually see the evaporator running. There are a few places you can still see that around here. But it has been years since I had anything to do with it.
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Yup Syrup grading drives me nuts… Its as if you graded wine based on sugar content of the grapes and colour of the wine… I think you will start seeing a break into “Syrup” and “traditional craft syrup” because it is harder to make but SOOOO much better. Two of my commercial syrup friends run two styles evaporator and boiler. First for sale, second for home and friends…
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What JO sayd 
by the way, JO, do you make the same thin stuff in Sweden?
David, yes l have! Proud to say. I had a unique opertunity of trying @BillSchiller syrup last year. I am used to wine tasting but this was something else. He has a feel for mixing together the taste bud drugs. A fantastic experiance for a culinary addict like me.
No spice or ingredient is replaceable in any kichen. Each has its own character and use. I was reffering more to the “primitive” beginings of our love to sweet stuff. If you have a few hives of bees loaded with sweet, imposible to spoil, aromatic, nutrient filled honey (with a potential to make it in to alcohol ) each year with litle effort l see no reason to even try concentrating watery tree sap. Native americans hadnt had such luck.
One more thing to mention is people nowdays drain thr honey from the hive at intervals. I do dot. I am old old fasioned, l let bees pick all summer and blend all the honey, then l harvest some. The difference in taste is huge.
While on maples, this is some of the younger stuff l have.
I poked one with a knife today. Sap started driping emediatly! Is the sap good for syrup sa soon as it starts to flow?
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The sap is good until the trees bud out. Once the buds come the sap gets bitter.
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Yes and no… What is the temperature like? Usually you need a freeze at night and a thaw during the day to give you that capillary action which pumps sugars up to the limbs. When do trees bud there? Looking at that picture maybe the biggest tree shown could be tapped here it is about 20cm for tapping. Some places in the US will cut smaller trees off and pump the stumps but I have not seen that myself.
Some say this is the future it might be how you could go for a young maple bush.
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From what I could find, the trees you have should contain sugar. You really want 8" diameter tree or larger for the health of the tree. The bigger tree produces more sap. As mentioned above, freezing temperatures at night and thawing temperatures during the day are needed for sap flow. The method David provided will work but then you’ll need electricity and a diaphragm pump.
Remember, you’ll need 40-60 gallons of sap for 1 gallon of syrup.
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I stand corrected then I’m sure bill boils the good stuff…
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Actually David, I believe the setup in the video you posted is a trial from Dr. Tim Perkins from UWV. He’s well known in the maple world. He won’t provide information on how well it works. The purpose for it is to set up for commercial maple farming. His attempt was to get more volume per acre from 7 year old maples. I think he’s looking to get a patent on the cap that goes on the portion that was cut.
I did the same to some clump birch I have on my property without a diaphragm pump. It did drain well but the volume wasn’t very good.
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An old timer told me if you have to cut down an old maple tree you can leave the stump high and cut it with a drainage point into a bucket come spring. He claimed the roots would pump up the sap come spring and that you might as well collect it. I never tried it myself.
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Joep, the reason I chose that video was we visited Mallorca back in 1999 when our kids were still kids. We saw this guy flip pancakes back then and apperently he still does. He’s got some kind of “jumping disorder”.
Yes, we do. But also, we sometimes make a thick pancake in an oven tray, with chunks of salty belly pork mixed in. That’s food for men (or big women 
) We eat that with lingonberry jam.
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JO, is the recepie for the thick one the same as for the thin ones? Sounds good.
So l have a feald l plan to clear this winter, its overgrown with maple trees around 5-10" thick. Do you guys sugest l cut down the trees and harvest the sap from the stump or drill them then cut them when sap stops flowing?
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Depends what you plan to do with the stumps and roots. Are you planning on farming that land? Sometimes with some of the smaller trees you can use the purchasing power of the upper part of the tree to pull the whole thing out with the roots. A couple of snatch blocks and a cable can increase the mechanical advantage. Clean land is probably worth more than a few gallons of sweet water.
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Yes, only a little less salt because of the pork/bacon.
Yes the feald was suposed to be the most fertile one on my land, so the neighbours say. Reserved for more demanding crops like cabbage and potatoes. I plan to continue in that manner. Roots are not a particular problem becouse l am moveing towards no till methods of farming, its far less work with better yeald so the roots will have time to decompose without bothering me. It wuld be nice to make some use from the trees other thain firewood.
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If you have some time put pigs on the field and put their grain around the stumps. They will definitely uproot them for you. My grandfather claimed if you wanted to get a big stump out you just had to be careful where you put the feed for the pigs and they would do all the digging you wanted.
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Yes, pressure from the roots is real. I cut a tree before I realized it was a maple the first winter I was here. The same thing happens with birch.
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I had forgotton about walnut and butternut.
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Drilling a hole or two in them will help them decompose faster. you need bacteria action, i just use a bit of dirt and hope that is enough. It is a lot easier now with a battery powered drill… 
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