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Maple Syr Up Research Paper

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How to make Maple Syrup

My family has been making maple syrup for over 100 years. My siblings, cousins, and I are the 6th generation of syrup makers in our family. Everyone in the family has their part to play during the 6 week long syrup season. The process of making maple syrup is a long and hard one but in the end it’s totally worth all of the loss of sleep, frozen and aching limbs, and the extra time we take out of our lives to make syrup every year. Our family usually starts the season on Valentine’s Day as a family tradition to start drilling in the woods and to get all of the firewood we need ready for the entire season. For the whole 6 week season we need to use 30 chords of firewood to use during the evaporation process. …show more content…

The first grade is called Grade A it has three different ambers and is mostly used on the table. There is light amber, which is light in color and delicate in taste. Medium amber has a mellow flavor to it and medium in color. The dark amber is obviously dark in color and full flavored. The next grade is B which is mostly used in the kitchen but personally, this is my favorite grade of syrup. It is more robust in flavor and it is used mostly to cook with. The next grade is C which is the commercial syrup. We don’t usually sell this stuff off our shelves to the customers but it still has a good maple flavor. The last grade is grade D which is the nastiest syrup of the season. Its what we call “Buddy Syrup”. It has that name because since it’s the last sap of the season collected, it has a bitter taste to it from the buds of the trees. We don’t sell it or even bother putting it in the jugs like the rest of the syrup. We put it in the stainless steel drums and it gets taken to factories that make the syrup sold in grocery stores. So, the factories take 2% of the “Buddy Syrup”, and 98% water and corn syrup and mix it all together and send it to grocery stores all over and most people buy it that way. The buddy syrup can also be used to sweeten tobacco and horse feed. It can also turn out to look just like the other grades that we actually sell to customers. All I have to say is that Mother Nature can be great to work with some years, and others, she can be a real pain in the

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