Last week, Reporter Sean was doing a story on a Dexter family that produces maple syrup, and he asked me to come along and shoot a few photos to accompany the story.  The interview turned out to be fascinating and educational for both Sean and me, and it didn’t take long for us to learn perhaps the most important fact about maple sap: when it’s boiling on the evaporator, it smells exactly like graham crackers.  Not just a little like them, but exactly like them.

Other important maple syrup facts:

• To be tapped, a maple tree needs to be at least 40 years old.  That may sound like a long time, but maple trees can live to be even older than Larry King, so that still leaves plenty of productive years: the lifespan of a maple can be as much as 300 years, which means a tree could be tapped for over 250 years.  If you’re keeping track, that’s longer than the United States has been a country.  If you’re not keeping track … well, it’s still longer than the United States has been a country, and George Washington would like to have a word with you.

• It takes 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup, a ratio that makes maple syrup production very much like American Idol, except American Idol doesn’t have such a delicious conclusion.  Also, this means you can thank those other 39 gallons of sap for that graham cracker aroma.

• Production is dependent on the weather: when the temperatures are below freezing at night and above freezing during the day, the sap will flow.  Without those weather conditions, you’ll collect only imaginary sap, and imaginary sap tastes good only on imaginary pancakes.

• It’s no wonder Canada put a maple leaf on its flag: Mountie Nation produces over 70% of the world’s supply of maple syrup.  In fact, it’s a good thing the Canadian flag doesn’t feature a full maple tree — if it did, the tree would probably be tapped for syrup.

Maple syrup in Dexter (19 March 2009)