 Welcome to the eighth session of our 2021 Field to Fork webinar series. My name is Julie Gardin Robinson and I'm a Food and Nutrition Specialist with NDSU Extension, and I will be your host for today's webinar. As you can see in this slide, our upcoming webinars will feature me and also my colleague, Landa Nwadeke, who does food safety research and outreach in Kansas and Missouri. We hope you are joining us for the entire series of 11 webinars, and if you miss one, they will be archived. Today, we are using the Zoom webinar function. You will all be in listening mode today without cameras or microphones. People watching this live will be able to ask questions in the chat box. So you can go ahead anytime and type your questions. And I will pose those questions to our speaker after his presentation today. In this slide, you'll note that I have a special request for all viewers of the live talk and any of the archives to maintain our funding sources and offer these types of programs in the future. I ask that you take the very short survey that will land in your email inbox shortly after today's talk. We will have random prize drawings, so you may receive a prize in the mail if you win. After submitting your survey, you will be redirected to a second survey where you enter your name and mailing address. I offer two acknowledgments today. First to the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service for our field to fork funding. We also have a contribution from Purdue University through a grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. We thank all of these entities for their support. And now it's time for me to introduce our featured speaker. I am very pleased to introduce Joseph Zalesnik. Joe is a Forest Tree Specialist for NDSU Extension. His duties are broad and cover most of the tree related topics, including windbreaks, tree selection and pest identification. He's also done a lot of tree ring research in both North Dakota and Minnesota. Joe grew up in the Maple Syrup Capital of Ohio and spent many years boiling sap when he was younger. Welcome, Joe. I'm glad you're doing a webinar for us. All right. Well, thanks, Julie, and thanks to everybody for joining us today. Happy to be here. Very excited about this. Let me do a little bit of background. As Julie said, I grew up in the Maple Syrup Capital of Ohio, little town of Shardon, Ohio, grew up outside of there in Jogga County, about 30 miles east of Cleveland. If you're familiar with Ohio Geography and there's little Joey with his very first tree, it was actually a golf ball tree. It was not a maple tree, but hey, we can go grow golf balls in Ohio, especially if you're five. And one of the interesting things about the forests in Ohio is we get this little pocket of what we call the Northern Hardwood Forest in the northeast part of the state. The northern hardwoods are dominated by sugar maple, which is very interesting. And as we said, as I said, I grew up in the Maple Syrup Capital of Ohio. The Maple Festival is held there every year in the spring. My sister was the maple queen in 1975. So I get to tease her every year about how many years it's been since she was queen. So we did a lot of maple syrup when I was a kid. It was a good way to keep nine kids busy between us and the neighbors. And it's pretty straightforward. It's not easy, but it's not complex. I take that back. It can be it can be as simple or as complex as you want. But it's very time sensitive. You collect sap in the spring. It's the only time of year you can do this. And that's when days are above freezing, nights are below freezing. So we have have to have this perfect storm. You know, last night, obviously it was below freezing. It was about 15 degrees where I was today. I don't know that it's going to get above freezing. So the sap won't be flowing today. Last week, it sure was last few days. It was except if it didn't get cold enough. So it's this really narrow window of time. And it's only like three weeks. The season is three weeks, maybe four weeks. I like and like in it a lot to either planting or harvest on the farms in North Dakota. And this stops when the trees break bud. Once the trees start breaking bud, then the sap stops flowing and you're done. So you collect sap, you concentrate the sugar in that sap. The sap has roughly four to six percent sugar. Sorry, two to two percent, six percent sugar. And you concentrate. There's a bunch of different ways to do that. And we'll talk about that today. And you package it up very straightforward. We'll talk about the different components of this, how you collect sap. There's a bunch of different ways, how you concentrate the sugar. Again, many different ways and some of the details about packaging. So sugar maple is the most common maple that's used to make maple syrup. You can use box elder, the sugar concentration is actually pretty close to sugar maple. There are other maples that can be used. They don't have as high a sugar concentration, but we will discuss one of those. Now, here's the thing, sugar maple. It's an interesting tree. It's one of my favorites. The wood is extremely hard. They make hardwood floors for basketball courts and bowling alleys out of sugar maple wood. But how do you tell sugar maple? Well, sugar maple, besides having opposite branching on the twigs, opposite leaves, they have pointy buds. I tell people, they say you have an ice cream cone with a point on it. It's called a sugar cone. Sugar maple has pointy buds. So you tell sugar maple. There is a black maple that's a subspecies of sugar maple. We don't see it around here. There's a big, enormous close up of those pointy buds. The leaves look like this. The seeds are there on the right. The seeds. Sometimes you can tell different maples by the way the seeds hang. Some are more horizontal, some are more vertical, whether they come down in a kind of a concave. They drape down concavally or convexly. It's very subtle, all these differences. Now, one of the things about sugar maple is it's not native to North Dakota. That's one of the challenges. You got to go about 40 miles east into Minnesota. Before you start seeing them. Or you got to go down into South Dakota in a very small pocket. It does so, so here in North Dakota, sugar maple needs a very good soil and needs a very good soil. Is it cold hard enough for North Dakota? Absolutely. If you if you get the right seed source, absolutely. Sugar maple grows way up into northern Minnesota and a little bit into Ontario. There is a tiny little pocket of sugar maple down in South Dakota at Sitchi Hollow State Park. I've driven through there and there's sugar maple trees there. It's pretty amazing. It's very protected area, very good soil. This map shows them being native to North Dakota. I don't know that I believe this, but it's certainly cold hard enough. So what can we do to make maple syrup in North Dakota? We can use box elder and box elder. Some people call it box elder maple. And it is native to North Dakota. A box elder. How do you tell a box elder tree? Opposite branching, opposite leaf arrangement. And it's got this kind of a whitish twig. And it's Glockus. What does Glockus mean? It means it's kind of dusty. There's a white film on it. And sometimes it looks white. Sometimes it looks a little blue. Sometimes it looks a little purple, depending on the individual plant. And it has compound leaves. OK, the bud is way back there at the base of the leaf. And these are all little leaflets. OK. So it's a compound leaf. And it's the only, well, likely the only compound leaf maple you're going to find in North Dakota. There's there is one. It's very, very, very, very uncommon. That's not native that I've seen, like, only on the end issue campus. So box elder trees all over North Dakota. There are separate male trees and female trees. And so the female trees have the seeds. And you can see the seeds are much more droopy than sugar maple. But you can collect sap from both male trees or female trees. And the box elder bark looks like this. Just to point out that sometimes the bark of box elder is confused with that of green ash. It can be. It's a little bit darker. The ridges aren't as prominent as on as on green ash. But it's a little bit darker gray. So those are the most common sugar maple and box elder. And I know a couple of folks who are making sap out of box elder. But there's another one, silver maple, not native to North Dakota. This is native to the Eastern U.S. that sometimes people tap silver maple trees and they make syrup out of it. So the silver maple has these really deep veins on the leaf. And the bark is shaggy like this. It peels in these long strips that are separated at the top and the bottom of those strips. Silver maple doesn't have quite the sugar content that silver. I'm sorry, silver maple doesn't have quite the sugar content that sugar maple and box elder do silver maple has a lower sugar content in the sap, so it requires a lot more boiling. And what else to add to that? Silver maple is a huge tree. It can get enormous. It's native to river bottom stands, river bottom forests in the Eastern U.S. So how do you collect sap? You got this narrow window. We're either right in the middle of it now. And in some cases, I wonder if it's already passed. Such an early spring this year, very weird. So you got to drill a hole and we use a ship auger bit. That's traditionally what's been used. It works fine. And you can either use an old fashioned brace. That's that hand drill on the upper part there. Or you can use a power drill. That's fine. Battery powered drill works just fine. However, you have to go slow. We made this mistake one year. When I was in graduate school at Michigan State, we as a group, we tapped maple trees and made our own maple syrup for fun. And we were using a power drill and boy, we got that bit zipping through. Well, what it did is it smoothed out the inside of that hole so the holes didn't leak sap. So you have to go slow. And you only you go in only about an inch or an inch and a half. So you drill a hole. Some it really depends. The diameter really depends on your equipment. Some use a seven sixteenths inch bit. Some use a five sixteenths inch bit. Really depends on what sap collecting equipment you have. We drill a hole into the tree. And under the right conditions, the sap will start flowing out. About one to one and a half inches below the bark. That's how deep you go. You don't need to go deeper. How many taps can you do if the tree is from 12 inches or to 18 inches diameter? It should have one tap. If it's above 18 inches diameter, it could have two taps. Basically, we don't want to over tap the tree. Yes, we're wounding it. Yes, we're providing a little bit of stress to it by collecting that sap. So we want to minimize that. And then you've got this hole. How do you collect the sap? You insert a spile. What's a spile? A spile is a tube. And these modern spiles, you attach that into the hole. And then that would attach to tubing, which I'll show you in a sec. In the old days, we would put something like this on the tree. I've used that one on the right many times and you would hang a bucket from that. And the sap would just drip out into the bucket drop after drop after drop. And so it needs to run all day for you to collect a decent amount of sap. And if you want to go really, really traditional, you can even hand whittle your own spiles. I have not done this. I think that's going a little bit overboard. But hey, if you want to do that, great. So how do you? OK, we drilled a hole. We've inserted a spile. Now we need to actually collect the sap. How do you do it? Well, this is from my brother, Jim's place in Ohio. And he's got these two trees tapped. There's a third one on the right. And what he has is he's got these attached. The spile is attached to a little tube. And that little tube goes to a bucket that's on the ground. And you notice he's got a lid on each bucket and a brick to hold that lid in place. The the lid does a couple of things. It keeps out any insects. Then, you know, early season bugs do try to get in there. It's sugar water that's collecting. Keeps out critters like moths, not just moths, those are insects. But dogs, the neighborhood dogs, the raccoons keeps them out, too. And it also keeps out rainwater. That's the thing that took me years to figure out when I was a kid that, wow, when it rained, we got a lot of sap, except we didn't. We got a lot of rainwater. We didn't get sap. So there's multiple ways to do it in a professional operation. There is sap. There are sap lines running throughout the forest and they're running downhill into a larger central collection area. And sometimes they even use a pump to assist with pulling sap out of the trees. And it comes downhill to a central collection area. And these folks, what they do is once a day, they'll go to that central collection area, pump it into another tank, which they take back to the sugar shack where they're going to boil it down. I'm not sure if this is showing this is from Jake's Jake's syrup and natural products outside of a kind of north of Pelican Rapids, Minnesota, although I think their mailing address is Virgus. And they've collected their sap from those larger garbage cans, put it in the tanks in the trailer, and then they bring it back to this old milk tank. So there's a lot of different ways to do this. So we've collected the sap. And then what do we do? We got to turn the sap into sugar or turn the sap into syrup. How do we do that? We concentrate the sugar. So sap is coming out of the tree somewhere between two and six percent sugar. And it might be a little more, might be a little less. And we got to get it up to sixty seven percent sugar. That's a lot of sugar. Yeah, your maple syrup is a lot of sugar. How do we do that? Boil, boil, boil, drive off water. Concentrate the sugar in there, drive off a lot of water. So there's a bunch of different ways you can do it. This is from Jesse Kist, who lives out in Bismarck, North Dakota. Colleague of mine. He's making maple syrup from from box elder trees. He's one of the few people I know in North Dakota who's doing this as a fellow up near Pemena. Or no, he's more by crystal. Anyway, in the northeast part of the state, and I believe at Fort Stephenson State Park, they're making some maple syrup there. This is my brother's setup. This is his outdoor setup. He says, yeah, I think I'm going to need a new outdoor setup soon. In Jesse's setup here, you can see he's using firewood. He's using wood to heat that. I think my brother's using propane. He's got propane burners, at least for his outdoor setup. And then what my brother does is he brings it inside to finish it off. He gets it close outdoors and then finishes it off inside. Now, if you're going to do this as a business, you get an evaporator. And the modern evaporators are phenomenal. Of course, this is a large capital investment, but it does a great job of getting the water out. And we're not going to go into the details of this, but suffice it to say there's a lot of heat, a lot of energy that goes into this. And these are expensive, but well worth it if you're going to do this commercially. Also, another modern way is to use reverse osmosis. And reverse osmosis, if you remember from chemistry class, is you're using pressure to push water out of the solution to concentrate the solutes, the dissolved materials, which is in this case, sugar. And this is again from Jake's maple syrup or Jake's, sorry, they changed their name. Jake's syrup is natural products over in Minnesota. And they've got an RO system there. And a lot of people have RO systems for their drinking water at home. So you use reverse osmosis and you still have to boil. So the modern systems, the reverse osmosis helps, but really to get to the final product, you still have to boil it. And you're going from 4 to 67 percent sugar. How do you know when it's done? How do you know when you've reached 67 percent sugar? You can taste it and my palate's not so refined, I couldn't tell. There's a bunch of different ways. But technically, technically, you know, it's syrup when it reaches seven degrees above the boiling point of water, you're boiling this concoction and it's boiling away and it reaches two twelve, reaches two thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, so on. Well, when it's seven degrees above the boiling point of water, then it's done. Now, in theory, two twelve is the boiling point of water, right? Except if you're at elevation and if your thermometer is not calibrated, right? Maybe your thermometer reads two thirteen at the boiling point of water. Maybe it reads two eleven. Maybe it's a little higher or low. So you have to calibrate the thermometer. And if you listen close, here's an old timer, yeah, my brother. Here's an old timer boiling his sap and he's almost there. Even closer now, come up a degree. And this year, water boils here at two eleven instead of two ten, like it has in previous years. So tastes and feels done, but we're waiting to two eighteen. And then it'll be done. So I don't know if you could hear that, but he said that this year water boils at two eleven at their place. In previous years, it was two ten. And that was interesting to me. Yeah, because I I never had that issue. And if you could see the thermometers, the digital thermometer, it was a two seventeen. He was waiting for it to get to two eighteen. He said it looks and feels done, which, you know, the more you do this, you do get a sense for when it's close. When I used to do this a lot, one thing we noticed is that near the end, the bubbles got smaller, they got substantially smaller. And you could really tell it was very interesting. Another tool I've never used this. I've seen it use, but I've never used this as a hydrometer. And you can tell when it's done by the density as liquid as sugar concentrates, it actually changes the density of that solution. So a lot of professional sugar mapper, sugar makers, syrup, pardon me, a lot of professional maple syrup makers use hydrometers. And there are a bunch of different types out there. But this is one way to do it. And then once you've made syrup, well, it's time to package and store it. And we always did filter it one way or the other. My brother uses these cloth bags. I've used what we used a lot was cheesecloth, just cheesecloth and a strainer. You know, we were making small batches. I won't tell you what we did in the Forest Genetics Lab. Oh, maybe I will. We use the centrifuge to filter it out. It was a very interesting setup. I like my brother's use of PVC here. In his homemade setup, it was kind of amusing. I have to have to tease him about that. But regardless, it works. Professionally, this was interesting. They're using a filter press, a filter press to. Press the water through these filters. Sorry, press the syrup through these filters and the sugar goes through. The syrup goes through. But any solids that are left behind don't go through. And let me tell you, there's always some bugs in there. There's always some debris of some sort. So this is an interesting way to do this. One of the jobs I had years ago, I worked at a chemist and worked in a chemical plant and there was wastewater. And we used a filter press to get the solids out of the wastewater. So this is really interesting to me to see this being used for food. And obviously, these are food grade pieces of equipment. So it's very different. And then bottling lots of options. Oh, there's a bunch of different ways you could go with this. I want to point out these were these were all in my fridge. And I probably have to get rid of a bunch of these. They've been around for too long. One of the things I want to point out is the pure maple syrup. OK, labeling, if you're going to sell it commercially, the only way you can use the term pure maple syrup is if it's this stuff. It can't have corn syrup in it. It's maple sap that's been boiled down plain and simple. Now, there is some stuff I got from Manitoba years ago. It's Manitoba maple syrup. This was made out of box elder. I don't know what the Canadian rules are for labeling commercial commercial maple syrup or retail maple syrup. My brother's doing this. There's a bunch of different ways you can do it. We always used clear glass bottles. These are easily available online. So lots of options for bottles. These need to be stored in a cool area away from sunlight. Maple syrup should last for a year, maybe even a little longer when it's just stored out of sunlight and away by itself. It's bottled up. If it's opened, you should put it in the fridge for up to a year. When I was growing up, we always thought that, oh, it's it's fine being out because it's so sugary that nothing's going to grow in it. Well, research has shown actually that mold can grow in it, but it's really, really slow. So if you keep it if it's been opened, if you keep it sealed in the fridge, you can do that for up to a year and you should be fine, should be safe. Sugar crystals might form. And in the bottom of this jar, there's all kinds of sugar crystals that have formed. Sometimes we lose a little bit of water off the top. So the sugar concentrates even more. And if the sugar gets too concentrated, it will start to recrystallize out of solution. It's very interesting. Is it a problem? No, no, you can you can add water and heat it up and and re-dissolve it. It's no big deal. It's just sugar, sucrose. Grades of syrup. If you are doing this commercially, this was interesting. A few years ago, the US, the USDA, I believe, did they change their grading system for maple syrup? There used to be a grade A, light amber, medium amber, dark amber, and then there was grade B. And what they changed to do was everything's grade A. So that was kind of interesting. I read a really neat article about this. We talked about grade inflation. They had to laugh. So, yes, it's all grade A now, but it's grade A golden. It's grade A amber, grade A dark, or grade A very dark. And these are a little bit different in their flavor. It's subtle. It's subtle. You have to have a really refined palate to to taste these differences. But some people can, some people can. And then there's a processing grade, which I think that's used more in other other foods, not sold as plain maple syrup. I believe sometimes they even use them in in cigars. So we'll figure. All right, a few other things. This is actually a little bit shorter than I'd hope. But it's it's interesting since we're not having questions till the end. Yield roughly, it's about 45 to one. So every 45 gallons of sap, you'll get one gallon of syrup. That's huge. That's a big ratio. You got to get rid of a lot of water. So this is a very energy intensive process. You got to boil, boil, boil. And that's why maple syrup is so expensive because they put a lot of energy into it. I think personally, I think it's worth it. But hey, that's me. Another rule of thumb is for every tap that you have, you can expect about one quart of finished syrup per tap in an average year, give or take with my brother. Actually, that's what he got this year was he had four taps. He had about a gallon of syrup. And he was packaging it, I think, in half points. So it was not a whole lot enough to share with the family at Christmas time. I think he's going to give it to his kids and grandkids before his brother. Oh, well, I'll get over it. I have heard that syrup from silver maple trees almost has a vanilla flavor. I'd be very curious to see what people have to say about that. I have not tasted it, but I'd be very curious. Another question I have is organic maple syrup. This has been a fight for the last few years, and I don't know if it's been resolved yet. But some people claim that their maple syrup is organic. It's not produced with the use of herbicides or other insecticides. And to be honest, I don't know where this argument is at because my understanding is, well, nobody uses insecticides or other chemicals in the production of maple syrup. It's you boil it down. You boil down sap and you've got syrup, and that's it. That's why it's pure maple syrup. So with that, we kind of breeze through this pretty quick. I'm going to see if there are questions. And I have several questions, Joe. So I'll just get started. I'm going to start in the chat area. Renee said, I have only one maple tree. It's about 50 feet tall. And I'm wondering if there is a low-cost kit where I could try this, and if the yield would be worth the effort. Where can you get the products to do this? I live out by Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. I went to our local fleet farm. And by the time I got there, they were sold out. The equipment can be pretty low-cost. You can make stuff at home. You can use a five-gallon bucket to collect the sap if you want. It's the spiral that's pretty unique. So the question is, can you do this at home? Sure. Is it worth your while? That's up to you. It takes a lot of boiling. To do, let's say you have a gallon of sap. How much syrup can you expect? I'll ask Julie that, since that's a food math question. How many fluid ounces in a gallon? I'd have to do some calculating on that, Joe. Is it 128? I believe. I think so. 16, 8-ounce cups. Okay. We'll call it 128 at 45-to-1, how many fluid ounces would you get, give or take? You would get just under three fluid ounces. If you had a gallon of sap, you would get just under three fluid ounces of syrup. How many teaspoons is that? It's not much. Not very much. Yeah. Personally, I loved doing this as a kid. I love doing this in graduate school. But it's so intense. You have to do a lot of it to make it worth your while, for me, for my time. But it was a great way, like I said, when I was growing up, this was a great way to keep nine kids busy in the spring. It's a great way to get the family together. You want to make something homemade to share with your family and friends? This is a wonderful thing to do. All right. Annie has a comment that she has made syrup from both sugar and silver maples, and both were yummy. So there you go. Yeah, very good. Lanna has a question. Do you want to angle the hole slightly upward to aid the sap run? Yes. Yes, thank you for pointing that out. And actually, you can see it in this photo where the buckets hanging off that tree. It is angled slightly upward. And you might have covered this, but Lanna is asking how much sap might be collected per year. Collected per day from one tree. It's highly variable. The amount of sap from a one tree in a given day is really variable, because it really depends on those temperatures. If you, you know, I said you have to have nights below freezing days above. Well, let's say it got down to 30 at night and 34 during the day. Technically, that gives you that gap, that below freezing above freezing gap. But to be honest, it's not going to flow much. If it got to 30 at night and 45 during the day, it's going to flow a lot. It really depends on the day. Annie has another comment. If you're spraying the tree with chemicals, they wouldn't be organic. And I guess my question is, are there some chemicals that would be considered organic that you could use? Boy, that's a good question. Yeah, they're, they're, well, no, not chemicals. What if they're natural? I think in the Northeastern U.S., there are some pests they worry about. One's called a thrip and that they worry about on sugar maple. And so they might be spraying the trees for those. But generally, I think most people don't worry about pests. Ron is saying he has 68 trees tapped in Otter Tail County, about four miles north of Jake, so. Very good. Very good. Actually, well, I'm about four miles north of Jake's, although I'm in Becker County. Interesting. At Jake's Maple Syrup, they've got 1,300 this year. They've actually gone down. They were at 2,000 taps. So that's pretty crazy. Another question, how often do you collect? Collection depends on the weather. Again, if it's, you get those big sap flows, then you collect. If you're not getting big sap flows, then you don't. Generally, what people like to do is, if the sap is flowing, that's when you, that's when you make syrup. Generally, they don't store the sap for days and days on end to let it build up. When I was in graduate school, we did that simply because, you know, as students, we're doing this homemade, kind of a burner like Jesse Kist had there. We needed enough of it to make it worth our while. So we would let it build up. The downside of that is, if you collect sap and let it build up, there is the chance that you could start growing mold or bacteria in it. So Renee says she has a reverse osmosis filter for water and is wondering if it can be adapted somehow for the syrup. That's a great question. I don't know, but I would assume yes. A reverse osmosis is reverse osmosis. It's pressure pushing, pushing the solution such that the water comes out the other side that, you know, you're concentrating the solutes on the one side and having more pure water on the other side. How long might it take a gallon of sap to boil down on the stove top? That's a good question. An hour, two hours? It takes a long time and that's a rolling boil. I mean, you could see from my brother's video, that was a rolling boil and it takes several hours. Okay, here's a safety question. Is it safe to tap if the leaves have black tar-like circular spots that sometimes occur in late summer? Yes, it is. Obviously, the tree won't have leaves when you tap, but yeah, that's a fungal problem that's specific to the leaves. It's not the sap that's inside the stem. Okay, Sue has a long comment and I'll read it exactly. I have heard that people have ruined their wooden cabinets by boiling in kitchens and here in Wisconsin, I have heard maple syrup maker figures range from 30 to 40 gallons sap to make a gallon depending on the year and the sweetness of the syrup conditions. They say each year can be different and even the colors. I wonder if the state area varies that much. I have heard some say they have tapped oak too, but I can't imagine that as nearly good or as sweet. Okay, we'll start with that 30 to 40 gallons to get one gallon of syrup. I believe it. I believe it could vary that much. That 45 to one is just an average that was used for years. Yeah, some years it could get a lot better sugar production out of a given tree or locally, regionally. Yeah, I believe that. And yeah, I believe that people could ruin their cabinets if they get too much water indoors. The last part of your comment was tapping oak. I've never heard of oak. That's interesting. There is a birch syrup that can be made. There's a sweet birch tree that grows in New England, far northeastern U.S. I would love to grow those out here because you can tap those and you make a birch syrup that besides being sweet also has a little bit of a winter green flavor. Does taking sap out help or harm the tree? It depends how much you take out. That's why we recommend only one tap per tree, per 12 inch diameter tree. If the tree is smaller than 12 inches diameter, then we recommend don't tap it. It's too small and collecting the sap from it would be too stressful for it. Okay, now I'm going over to the Q&A. Is there a standard of identity for maple syrup per the Food and Drug Administration? I don't know. What is standard of identity? Many foods have a standard of identity that if you call something milk, for example, it comes from a cow. That's why if it's a plant milk, it will say soy milk or almond milk, but milk, in my understanding, standard of identity comes from a dairy product. Sure, sure. Kind of like some of those European rules about certain cheeses or wines. If it's got that name, that means it comes from that place. Like champagne or some of those, yeah. Not that I'm aware of, but the only way the bottle can say pure maple syrup is if it comes from a maple tree. Dean is asking, do you have to tap the tree each year or can you use the same tap year to year? You have to re-tap it every year. The recommendations are to be at least over two inches and up or down two inches from the previous tap hole so that you don't stress the tree too much or especially all in one area. Those tap holes, if the tree is otherwise healthy, it can close over the tap hole in one year. The worst I've seen is two years if the tree is otherwise healthy. So you can easily keep tapping around the tree and avoid being close to the previous tap hole pretty easily if you do it right. The other thing is can you get rot inside the tree, a fungus that will rot the tree? Generally you don't. Again, this is all about tapping or versus overtapping. If you tap just enough, the tree should block that off really quickly and not rot out. There are some stain fungi that'll get in. I've seen timber, lumber that's cut from trees that had been tapped previously. You see this nice streak of kind of a bluish streak going up the piece of lumber. It's very interesting, but the wood is solid. It's just a different color. Suzanne says a friend gave her some syrup that he tapped. It was in a pie jar with a lid. She stored it in the refrigerator. When she went to use it six months later, it had a layer of film on top. It looked like mold, so I threw it out. Do you think it was mold or could it have been something else? I think it may have been mold. That's surprising. Where I have seen mold, I've had it happen to me a couple times. Where I've seen that happen is where it wasn't quite up to that 67%. The higher sugar concentration you get, it might be so rich that molds can't grow. When you start to get a little bit lower and lower, that's when you start having problems. Mold grows really well on high sugar items like jams and jellies. This would be another high sugar item. Kelsey says with the grades of syrup, I know you said there isn't much a difference in taste. Is it the level of sugars or something else that causes how dark the syrup gets? There is a bit of a difference in taste. It's that I can't detect it, though. Personally, I don't have the palate to really detect it. They say the darker syrups are a more bold flavor. I have tasted stuff that's actually started to get bitter, which is a surprise to me. To be honest, I don't know what causes the different colors. What's in maple syrup besides sugar water or highly concentrated sugar water? There are some amino acids in there as well. I think that profile of amino acids might change over the course of the spring. One thing we noticed when we were doing this in graduate school is, again, you would get more and more bacteria later in the season because it was getting to be a little warmer. And the combination of sugar and certain amino acids can lead to a browning effect. So there's food science for you. The Maylard reaction? Oh wait, no, that's meat. No, it can't be sugar. So Kara says that she got her equipment on Amazon and eBay. Except for the reverse osmosis system. And you might have said the answer, but typically how long is the process from tapping to finish syrup? Well, it depends when the sap runs. It depends how much sap you have to boil and what kind of system you have. But we would be boiling for hours, typically. It was, now as graduate students out in the woods in a spring night, we may have had some drinks going around and we kind of enjoyed it. It was a great social time. But we would be up till 10, 11 o'clock at night, 12 o'clock at night. And we had started boiling at dinnertime. So it takes a long time. Sherwood comments that he uses half pint canning jars. Boils hot syrup, puts it in the jars and seals. And is wondering if that will make the syrup store longer. And I'm going to make a comment real quick. I don't have recommendations at this point for canning syrup. But Joe, any experience with that? You know, we never used canning jars. So I can't speak to that directly. The stuff we used, yes, we did package it hot while it was right after boiling. You run it through the filter and we would put it in those jars while it was still hot. And I think that helped to seal it. But I've never used an actual canning jar with the canning lid. And I've never looked for recommendations on that. But I will say that for jams and jellies, we have an extra process. It's hot when it goes in the jars, but then you also put it in a boiling water bath. But again, I don't know that I've looked for. I've never been asked a question about canning syrup. So if anyone wants to follow up with me, Sherwood, you can reach out to me at NDSU Extension and I can look farther. Okay, now I'm going to pop back over to the chat. So you have lots of questions here. Sure, I can see they're still coming in. Just some comments again on where people got their information. Renee says, I've had maple syrup stored in oak barrels, giving it a slightly smoky taste. I've heard that it can't be classified as 100% pure maple syrup. Is that true? I have no idea. That's a great question. I don't know. I would imagine, boy, with those, I don't want to call them additives, but with that different flavor that the barrel gives it, I wonder. That's a good question. I don't know. Ben is wondering about recommendations for cleaning the tubing used to collect the sap. Recommendation is yes, clean it. At the end of the season, sorry for the smart Alec answer, at the end of the season, that tubing has sugar in it. And yes, you do need to clean it. A bleach solution, I don't know what percentage of bleach I would imagine, probably the standard one cup and one gallon, is probably a good way to do it. One of the challenges for people who do use tubes, I'm going to go back to this. Use a tubing system out in the woods, use the lines. Sometimes the squirrels just will start chewing on them because they know that's where the sweetness is. That's where the sugar is. So it's a challenge. And yes, these do need to be cleaned at the end of the year. So Renee's comment. So I understand you to say that the tapping hole does not need to be covered once the spile is removed. Is that right? That's correct. That's correct. And Sue said she saw two very good reasons not to tap oaks. I should have checked before asking. They're not very sappy, so very low yielding. Oaks are susceptible to plant-sucking insects, and you don't want oak wilt, and it isn't as sweet as maple. I would believe that. Yeah, that's another interesting point, though, about that it doesn't produce as much sap. One of the things about oak trees is they have what's called heartwood, which is the center of the tree, and then the outer ring is sapwood. And sapwood is where water and nutrients go up to the top of the tree from the soil and the root system. Maples have a lot of sapwood. Oaks don't have much at all. So yeah, I could see that difference. It's a good point. And I see another question. It's about your filtration. Can you use coffee filters? Or if you use cheesecloth, how many layers should you use? Yeah, you could use coffee filters. I don't know how quickly the sap would go through it, but you certainly could. Try to remember in cheesecloth, boy, we used, I want to say at least two or three at a minimum. Basically, we're trying to get bug parts out. Fly's moths would come in and they'd land in the middle of our stuff, which was, you know, we're doing this out in the woods in the middle of the night, and we couldn't keep them out of there and we tried to. So occasionally we'd have to filter them out. I'd almost guess that the cheesecloth would work better than coffee filters. I think that might take a long time to get through. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Renee posts a link to some Wisconsin resources, so it's under food safety. So if you want to check that out, if you're on the call, Sue makes a comment open air cooking outside with breeze blowing smoke into the boiling sap gives it a smoky flavor. Sure, sure. And then Annie says butter muslin has a tighter weave than what is currently labeled cheesecloth. Just a comment. And Lana makes a note of mapletapper.com as a potential supply source. So for all of you out there that are looking to do this, I'll just get some from Joe, right? There's a lot of information available. Julie and I work in North Dakota and we are not the maple syrup capital of the world, that's for sure. This is a very unique product out here. Not very commercially viable. It could be to the right person who wants to do it commercially. Mostly this is just people going out and doing this for fun for themselves. Well, I think you answered all of the questions that I'm seeing and you had a bunch. So if anyone else has a question, you have 30 seconds to post it in the chat. So Julie grew up in northern Minnesota. Did you guys make maple syrup when you were growing up? Or did you have neighbors who did that? No, we did not. I did not grow up around that. We'd go to a task of park and pick it up there. Hey, the man, we're happy to support the local economy because it takes a lot of effort. It really does. Yeah, Kara makes a comment about coffee filters. She says they clog really fast and cheesecloth doesn't filter very well. So she bought the oil filters for deep fat fryers. So that sounds like a really good idea. Yeah, yeah, that could work. I am curious. I'm going to have to ask my brother what kind of filters he was using. I have no idea what he's using or where he got it, but I have to check with him. All right. Well, I think I'll draw us to a close. Thank you, everyone, for your interactive nature today. So it was great to give Joe a bunch of questions and some tough ones. And Joe, would it be okay if they followed up with you for questions? Sure. I'll be happy to help as best I can. What is your email? It is josephjoseph.zelesnik, Z E L E Z N I K. at ndsu.edu. So thank you again, Joe. That was really interesting. And thanks to all of you. I hope you enjoy me. Next week, I'll be talking about nutrition and food safety and fruits and vegetables. So thanks again and hope to see you next week.