Maple Syrup

The very best Maple syrup in the world comes from a mountainous state in the USA called Vermont, just below the Canadian border and close to New York. Here, the early American settlers learned the art of extracting Maple syrup from the Native Americans.

Vermont has an ideal climate for growing sugar Maple trees. The Spring season in Vermont brings cold nights and sunny days. The freezing temperatures during the night holds the sap in and then the warmth from the Sun during the day lets the Maple sap drip from the tap into a bucket or tubing. This sweet sap is then taken to the sugarhouse and boiled down into thick and delicious pure Maple syrup.

It takes approximately forty gallons of sap to boil down to one gallon of pure Maple syrup. It also requires a lot of hard work. Making syrup also requires intense heat and a lot of wood. In order to provide enough heat to make just one gallon of syrup it takes a piece of wood as large as a man.

It takes forty years to grow a Maple tree large enough to tap. A tree ten inches in diameter is considered the minimum tappable size for one tap. For each additional six inches in diameter, another bucket (tap) may be added. It takes four or five taps to produce enough Maple sap (forty gallons) to produce one gallon of syrup.

The normal maple season lasts four to six weeks sometimes starting as early as February in southern Vermont and lasting into late April in northern Vermont.

Vermont is the largest producer of Maple syrup in the United States, producing about one third of all the syrup produced in the USA. Every county in Vermont produces some maple syrup. It is estimated there are around two thousand Maple producers spread throughout the state. In 1995, those producers made an estimated 365,000 gallons of maple syrup, with a value of approximately $8,500,000.

Vermont Maple syrup is also made into Maple sugar, Maple cream and Maple candies. These products are made by evaporating more water from the Maple syrup and controlling the crystallisation process during cooling. Along with Maple syrup, these products are shipped all over the world.

Vermont's law, unlike other parts of the USA, requires syrup to be free from any preservatives or other additives. Pure Vermont maple syrup is an excellent source of organic sugar and its flavour is unmatched. You cannot mistake real Vermont syrup.

The Pancake Parlour uses pure organic maple syrup - liquid gold! The finest syrup in the world without a doubt. They import it especially from the North American Canadian region for the connoisseur.