Maple Syrup

my father used ot make maple syrup we used to hang those plastic gallons of milk containers it tasted alot better than store bought

same thing here, I remember the buckets (there were always little bugs floating in them...PROTEIN!), I know they use the tubes (connected to a pump) around here now but I've never seen bags like that.

I have never seen these plastic bags for collecting the syrup, that's just bizarre. Here in Quebec, in the old days they used to use stainless steel buckets. Now most use plastic tubing directly from the trees to a large container to simplify collection of the syrup.

That other stuff shouldn't even be mentionned in the same breath as maple syrup.

it's not just a Canadian thing. we used to make our own in upstate NY, too.

and, no, the fresh sap doesn't taste like water. it tastes like... tree. slightly sweet, a bit of green wood, earthy. it's nice. when i was ten, my friends and i would snip little branches off the neighborhood maples, just to get a little taste of sap.

One of the camps where I used to work had a network of purple plastic tubes coming from each maple tree, using gravity to get the sap to a collecting vat. (The purple was allegedly because squirrels can't see it... but really it made the whole grove look like some sort of maple Borg collective.)

I also used to work at an historical society, and one of the things I got to do was tromp around the sugarbush in February, showing the schoolkids and other visitors how to collect sap (in the buckets, poured into bigger buckets, poured into barrels on the sled pulled by draft horses, up to the tub on the uphill side of the evaporator) and make syrup.

The saddest part was when we gave them the blind taste tests, and they chose the corn syrup crap over the real stuff, since they'd never *had* the real stuff, before.