I just noticed that while the Sap! Maple Soda had 90 calories per can when I began this thread in January, the same product that I have now lists only 80 calories. Since they don't add sugar to it, and the amount of drink per can hasn't changed, are they using maple sap with a lower sugar count now? There are only three ingredients: maple sap, CO2, and citric acid.
I think this canned drink would also be good to use when cooking ham. I don't use Coke because it makes such a mess, but people who have tried it really like it. @Lois Winters Agreed. I grew up mainly with cane syrup my uncle made in his barn. Amazing stuff. My favorite is sorghum syrup. Since my parents sold their mountain place in north Georgia, I don't have access to it any longer.
There are syrup farms (if that's the right word) in parts of Virginia but I've only seen them on the Sunday AM farming shows...I've never visited them. This thread caused me to go look. There are 7 syrup farms in Highland County, which would be about a 2 hour drive for me (100 miles.) I'll have to plan a day trip. As others have stated, I'll only use real maple syrup on my pancake & French toast, as well as in my cooking. It's not cheap but a bottle lasts a long time...and it's so good. I've had birch beer as a child in Indiana. I know my father used to bottle homemade root beer but I'm not sure if he ever made birch beer. I recall all those white trees in the woods behind the house. I had no idea you could tap them. As an odd aside, we had a state politician who later went to DC named Birch Bayh. Birch was his father's name, too. I gotta think it's a name that's used in other similarly-treed locales.
I remember Birch Bayh. He was pretty prominent while he was in office, or maybe it's just that the name was memorable. I have a lot of maple trees on my land up north, but none of them are sugar maples. The other maples can be tapped, but are not as good for syrup as the sugar maples are. I've never tried it, but my dad used to tap the trees on our land in Michigan. It takes a lot of maple water to get a small amount of maple syrup, though, after it's boiled down.
Some of those farming shows with the syrup guys are rerun, so I recall quite a bit. They don't all have buckets hanging on spigots...some have a network of flexible hoses tying them all together into a few collection points. I don't recall if there was an issue with critter control. One would think there would have to be. I remember that one of those guys is still using great-grandma's open pan, with the family history of syrup making predating the Civil War.
Where do you get this stuff, Ken? In a supermarket with the beer or soda? I'd like to try it. There is a sugar shack about a mile away from me, but I only buy one bottle per year -- I have to stay away from sweets. This is pretty good stuff (aside from the grades, not all maple syrup is the same) and I drink it straight like whiskey. It seems wasteful to put it on pancakes or something, because then I can't tell much difference from fake maple syrup, although you can still taste the maple flavor pretty well if using the Real McCoy on ice cream.
We have a specialty beverage store here in town that carries it but they charge too much, so I order it on Amazon when it's in stock.
When I Google "Sugar Shack," the first result is a strip club premier adult entertainment in Wisconsin! The second is an independent donuts & coffee place in the state capital. I assume you all got syrup stores up your way???
A friend of mine here in town has a maple syrup business, and his 100% maple syrup and some other maple sugar products are available in the store here but, unfortunately, the prices are on the high side, and I can find other less expensive brands of 100% maple syrup that taste the same to me.
I've bought several brands of pure maple syrup in the stores. I can tell the difference between the real thing and the flavored sugar water,but I can't really tell one "real syrup" brand from another. Man, now I want some French toast.
Haha! A sugar shack is where the sap is taken (or drained into if the trees are uphill, as in the case below) to the evaporator and boiled down into syrup. You need to go in one sometime when the evaporator is cranking -- they're filled with thick sickly-sweet steam. Here's the one by me, pik taken in May 2018, was ready to go for the 2019 season. It has nice rustic wood siding now. They sell the bottled syrup inside there when they're still cooking. After that, they leave the bottles outside on the window sill, on the honor system, and you slip your money through a slot.
That's pretty cool. So these are not all legacy family operations, huh? Interesting to see new businesses doing old tyme work open up. I gotta visit one of those that are west of me, just to see it in operation.
Here is an article from just a couple of weeks ago referring to SAP! as a "new take on seltzer" just seen on Shark Tank. I wonder if these guys somehow revived the brand. (I also wonder why there are no licensing requirements to be a journalist. "A new take on seltzer"??? A kid has to jump through more hoops to sell lemonade on the corner...)