The Maple Boom

Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back.

You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized, so you can be ready to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Time for a tea break?

Time for a Pure Leaf.

With a Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase.

And you get big purchasing power.

So your business can spend more and earn more.

Capital One, what's in your wallet?

Find out more at capital1.com/slash spark cash plus.

Terms apply.

All right, coconut water is all the rage.

I can't stand it, but a lot of people love it.

Now, Maple Water might be saying, move over.

Brian Webb takes a look at what could be the next big thing.

The last few years with my family, we've been playing around with this concept of making maple sap into a drink, and we found a great way to do that.

And we've now created three products that are on the shelf here in Vermont.

Take a seat, coconut water.

There's a new drink in town, and it's made from tree sap.

Are you drinking tree sap, Cynthia?

Not at this exact moment, but I've tried it and it's pretty tasty.

And what about you, dear listeners?

Are you on the TreeSap train?

Or are you all wondering what the hell we're talking about?

This is Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

And this episode, we are going to answer all the maple questions you never knew you had.

I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And I'm Nicola Twilley.

And if the last time you interacted with maple products was pouring syrup on a pancake, you might be missing something.

We are in the middle of a serious maple boom.

So the other week I ventured out of the city in search of this maple boom.

The first place I visited was Sukup Farms, home to Mark and Jennifer Sukup.

And Mark told me that they had just built a new sugar house.

When I visited a couple of years ago, they were making syrup in a tiny shed that was half falling down.

That's where we had been making syrup since 55 when they started.

So obviously we're trying to get a little bit bigger, so we built a new space.

Everybody can fit in it now.

That first visit two years ago, they were also collecting sap in buckets and boiling it over wood.

Now they have fancy, new, high-tech gear and an extra 1,500 trees on tap.

They've quadrupled in size in just a couple of years.

Down the street, their neighbors at Crown Maple have doubled their production.

Tyg Rügenstein told me that measured in terms of 55-gallon barrels of syrup.

Last year we were just shy of 300, but that was with about 50,000 taps.

This year, we have 90,000 taps, so we should should expect a lot more than 300.

We should get closer to around 600 barrels this year.

Crown maple is now the second largest producer in the U.S.

Mark Atsukup said the whole field is exploding.

I believe the industry as a whole, in the States anyway, is growing at almost 10% a year,

which in an industry like that is almost unbelievable.

The demand is actually growing faster than the supply can keep up.

This is not the first maple boom.

In fact, maple has been huge in the region for thousands of years.

Well, the first people to tap maple trees were the Native Americans.

They were doing that throughout New England and across New York State, upstate New York, and other places, Michigan, and around the Great Lakes, wherever maple trees were.

Douglas Wynot wrote a book called The Sugar Season: A Year in the Life of Maple Syrup.

But of course, his research goes back much further than one year.

During that part of the year when the sap flows in the maple trees,

those folks would set up camp near the maples and they used receptacles that were made out of bark.

They placed hot rocks into sap-filled bark containers to evaporate off the water.

Sometimes to a sort of a paste, but often down to a hardened, like a sugar cake.

That was one technique.

They also took advantage of the fact that maple sap is mostly water, and when it freezes, you can separate out that water to get it the neat sugar.

Douglas says these techniques were some of the very first agricultural practices that Native Americans taught the European settlers.

In the 1700s, a colonist who was captured by natives ended up spending decades living with them in the region that's now Ohio.

And he later wrote about his experience, including his introduction to maple.

He described it as brown and very sweet, which seems about right.

But the first real maple boom among the European settlers came about for political reasons.

It was soon seen as a way of independence on trade with sugar from the Caribbean.

Maple syrup became a way of disabling the sugar economy or of protesting against the use of slavery to make sugar.

The state of Vermont was very prominent in this vein of abolitionism and independence.

The saying that developed was, no sugar made by slaves.

But when the war ended and everything got back to normal, the newly United States removed the tariff on white sugar.

White sugar became super cheap, and so, of course, that's what everyone used.

And so, the economic feasibility of making maple sugar changed.

You know, at that time, maple sugar was the dominant product for people who were doing this commercially.

But after the sugar tariff was abolished, you know, with the new politics of that era, the economy changed.

So, it was around the turn of the century, maybe a little before,

that sugar makers turned to making syrup in order to provide an alternative, a different product.

So, at this point in the early 1900s and throughout much of the 20th century, making maple syrup is kind of just a labor of love.

It's a fun, traditional thing, especially in the Northeast.

Everyone gets together when it's still a little snowy out, and the trees are making sap, and the syrup boils, and kids eat sticky maple candies.

Everything smells delicious, and everyone's happy.

Mark Sukhob told me that for his granddad, it was a side gig, a way to make a few extra bucks during the winter months when not much was going on on the farm anyway.

But in 2007 that all changed.

Michael Farrell is director of Cornell University's Maple Syrup Research and Extension Field Station and he told us why.

Around 2007 there was a shortage of maple syrup in Quebec.

They had three bad years in a row and there wasn't enough syrup to go around.

So the price of maple syrup shot up and all of a sudden it became actually profitable to make maple syrup.

A lot of times people would do this out of it, it's more of a labor of love and you know nobody's really getting rich at making maple syrup.

It's a lot of work, it's a lot of hard work,

the returns aren't that great.

But when you had that shortage happen and the price went up and all of a sudden you know you could still have this process you love to do and you enjoyed it and now you could actually make money at it.

Well, that was a big incentive for a lot of people to expand their operations and for new people to get started.

And so since that happened, you know, the production has doubled in the U.S.

Douglas also gives credit to the Canadians for bringing security to the industry.

They set up something called the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, which is an organized state apparatus.

It's like a union that sets quotas, promotes the industry, and holds a great deal of syrup in reserve.

So there are supplies to call upon in case the season in the United States or in Quebec is a poor one.

In other words, a big company like Walmart or Target will now bother to stock maple syrup because they know they can get it year-round.

The demand is growing overseas as well.

Douglas told us that the Japanese have caught the maple bug.

Consumption grew 252% between 2000 and 2005.

Mark said it was getting big in China now, too.

Actually, some of the Asian markets are some of the biggest consumers of maple right now.

They buy bulk from Canada and they use it in all kinds of sauces and everything.

So it's getting popular over there.

Welcome to the maple boom.

But quick reality check, we only consume about three ounces per person per year here in the U.S.

We do eat a lot of sugar, but most of it isn't maple.

So yeah, maple consumption is growing, but it's still small.

That said, there's a lot of room for growth.

So let's all go out and plant a maple forest.

I don't have quite enough space in the little shared yard behind my Somerville apartment.

But even so, it's a bit more complicated than just sticking some saplings in the ground.

Yes, as it turns out, even if you have several hundred acres to spare, you can't just become a maple syrup tycoon overnight.

To understand why, you have to understand the tree behind the breakfast topping.

The sap that becomes maple syrup is sap from the xylem.

I didn't remember this from high school biology, but there are two kinds of plumbing in a tree, xylem and phloem.

And phloem is the one that usually carries around the tree's food in the...

the form of sugar.

Xylem usually just has water and some minerals.

But the xylem in maple is sugary for whatever bizarre reason.

A few other trees do this too, but maple's pretty unique in funneling a fairly large quantity of sugar through its xylem cells.

Now, you might be picturing sap like that incredibly sticky stuff that falls on your car and you have to scrub off your windshield, but scrub that image.

Michael Farrell said maple sap is nothing like that.

Because it is mostly water.

It's 98% water on average with

just about 2% sugar and lots of other minerals and nutrients and all the other good stuff in there.

They have sugar in their xylem, but that is not the only thing that makes maple trees a little odd.

There's also some fancy hydraulics involved.

Most trees, you can't just stick a spout in them and expect the sap to run out.

It doesn't.

But in the maple, it does.

Maple trees have air bubbles in their wood that create space for ice to freeze.

And when you get freezing nights and warmer days, the ice freezes and then thaws.

Those little bubbles of freezing and thawing, they expand and shrink a little each time.

And that creates pressure that makes the sap flow more strongly.

Are you a a little confused?

We asked Abby Vandenberg to help explain.

She's assistant professor at the University of Vermont Proctor Maple Research Center.

The reader's digest version is freezing and thawing

generates pressure.

It has to do with developing a column of water.

It has to do with the unique anatomy of sugar maple wood

and also the fact that we're putting some sucrose in there at the same time.

And this weird combination of maple's internal peculiarities interacting with the temperature outside is why there's only a short maple season each year.

You have to have those freezing nights and then a good thaw during the day to get the sap to flow.

When I called Mark Sukup to see if I could visit, he knew exactly what days they would be boiling sap just based on the forecast.

So if you look at the long range, the 10-day forecast, you can definitely guess within a day.

basically of whether or not you're going to be busy.

Because again, really all you're looking for is mid-20s at night and 40s in the day.

It was the same deal, but a little more high-tech over at Crown Maple.

All of us have three or four different weather apps on our phone, and we're constantly watching it.

We've got monitors in the forest that from our iPhones or our laptops, we can monitor what the temperature is in the woods, what the vacuum is.

So you're looking to see if it's going to freeze that night, how warm is it going to get the next morning, and when is it going to get above freezing.

So you can figure out when the crew needs to go out, when you need to dispatch the tanker trucks so that they can pick up.

So it's all about the weather.

Because what they need is that difference.

If it's just barely freezing at night and just barely above freezing during the day, the pressure will be there, but it won't be high enough.

What that means is that the season usually only lasts six weeks or so, but it varies every year depending on what the temperature does.

The sap flow can start in January and end by March.

It can start in March and end in April.

It all depends on what kind of winter the Northeast is having.

And even within the season, you get days where it doesn't get above freezing and the sap doesn't run, and days where the weather is perfect and the sap runs for 36 or 48 hours straight.

And that's, unfortunately, in the syrup business, that's how it tends to be.

It's not very constant.

It's, you know, all hell breaks loose for two or three days, and then you sit around for two or three days.

So it's a short season and it's wildly variable.

Sometimes maple producers do nothing, sometimes they don't sleep for days.

Yeah, and when you consider that that quart of syrup is the product of basically 50 times that in raw sap, That's a lot of work.

50 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup?

That is crazy.

Mark wasn't boiling when I went by, but Tig over at Crown, he was.

He took me up to see the raw sap being pumped from the forest into the sugar house for processing.

What is this smell?

Like, it has a smell, but it's not maple-y.

Like, how do you describe it?

I just kind of say it's a little smells a little organic.

I mean, it's coming from a tree.

So it just has a little bit of that earthy, organic smell.

Yeah, it smells sort of almost mulchy.

And the color, this is greenish-yellow.

Well, once it's concentrated, it sort of takes on a little bit of a

brown, green, yellowish tinge.

But as we boil it, you'll see when it comes off the evaporator, it will be a nice, clear, amber color.

It was so weird.

You have this picture in your head of maple syrup, and then you see the sap, and it's green.

Nope, not at all what I'm picturing, but you know, it is a tree.

Downstairs, the sap was going from the tank into a reverse osmosis machine.

So this is the reverse osmosis machine.

This is taking out about 80% of the water today.

The reverse osmosis step is a little bit of a new innovation for the maple industry.

Before, you would just have to boil all the water out in an evaporator, and it took almost twice as long.

And that actually matters.

Without reverse osmosis, you use more wood or oil, obviously.

But it also affects the taste of the final syrup, because it's the evaporator stage where the maple cooks a little and you get that caramel flavor and color developing.

That is the sweet, sweet sound of sap boiling until it becomes syrup.

Nikki, I know we're a podcast and so audio does matter, but really I don't care as much about the sound of the boiling as about the smell and the taste.

So my mouth is watering.

Oh my god, I was sticking my mic practically into the bubbling syrup and when I pulled it back out, my fuzzy mic cover smelled amazing.

It still kind of does.

I mean, when you go home, you must smell like maple syrup.

Yeah, I mean, people do say that you smell kind of sugary, but

you've been running around too all day, so you might not smell the greatest from that.

I assume you actually got to taste it.

I am going to try to contain my jealousy right now.

We filled three barrels that night.

And then we took the samples into their tasting room.

And yes, we tasted it.

Oh.

It seems like like you are rendered nearly speechless with joy.

Now, please use your words.

Any more specific descriptions than mm?

Oh, I'm getting all kinds of mouthfeels again just thinking about it.

It was warm and buttery and a little nutty like caramel popcorn.

All I really have to say is mm.

So articulate.

That's why they pay me the big bucks.

One thing I found interesting in this whole story is that the taste of the syrup changes over the maple season.

Trees start producing buds in the spring, the weather's weather's warmer, and so there might be more microbes growing and producing other flavors in the syrup.

So, yeah, that had always been confusing to me.

You see golden or extra fancy grade syrup versus dark or grade B, but what's the difference?

Golden is like the champagne of syrup.

It's very rare.

The guys at Crown Maple told me that the very lightest syrup, golden, you only get that at the start of the season, and it's because of the type of sugar.

At the start of the season, the sugar in the sap is all sucrose, but as it goes on towards towards spring, that sucrose is turned into glucose and fructose, and those caramelize more quickly than sucrose.

So the maple sap naturally gets more caramelized during the evaporation process later on in the season, and it turns out darker.

Abby told us this is because of the microbes.

They flourish when the weather is warmer, and they're the ones who turn the sucrose into the other sugars.

But you know, I actually like that darker maple syrup better than the fancier champagne ones.

I think it has an interesting, more complex flavor.

Me too.

There's more going on.

So, okay, we started off explaining why you can't just go plant maples and make a quick million in the maple boom.

But we've taken a detour into how maple syrup is made.

So, back to the trees.

People historically have not been making all that much money off their maple forests, in part because the whole process was so inefficient.

But there have been some great technological assists.

One is the reverse osmosis machine.

The other is something called a vacuum tube.

Right, for years, Mark at Sukkup Farms just hung buckets on his trees, the old school way.

But a couple of years ago, he attached miles and miles of plastic tubing to his trees.

They're all connected to a vacuum pump.

Because the thing is, there's pressure built up in the tree, yeah, but there's pressure outside it too, just normal atmospheric pressure.

And that is pushing back on the sap and slowing down its flow.

But what happens in a vacuum system like we have is you apply up to 29 inches of mercury, of vacuum to the trees, and that can actually triple or quadruple the amount amount of sap you get out of that tree.

Because what that does is it basically neutralizes atmospheric pressure and lets the tree flow.

I had imagined that the vacuum tube was kind of sucking the sap out of the tree, but so it's actually not a sucking pressure.

No, it just helps it keep flowing.

A lot of the old school guys miss the bucket days and think the plastic makes the forest look ugly, but I actually found it kind of beautiful.

There's this whole kind of spider web of pale blue and white tubes knitting your forest together.

I love that image of the natural and the man-made, the technology weaving through the forest.

And of course, listeners, Nikki has photos.

Check them out at gastropod.com.

Abby also told us there are new and improved thinner vacuum tubes that work even without electricity.

All this innovation boosts the yield from maple trees, which is great for our would-be maple tycoons.

But is there a limit to what we can take from the tree?

If there is, no one has found one.

Certainly, we do experiments here where we try and take as much sap as we possibly can.

And thus far, we haven't been able to do that with you know where we would see an impact on the tree.

It simply doesn't hurt the tree.

The tree just seals up the hole from one season.

The maple producers tap somewhere else the next year.

Studies have shown that tapped trees grow slightly more slowly than untapped ones, but they seem to live just as long.

Mark said some of his best trees have been working hard for decades.

There's a couple of trees down the road here that are 100 years old and they've been tapped for, you know, 60 of those years and they show no signs of slowing down.

So they're actually some of our better producers.

We do have a couple of trees that are probably,

my best guess would be 200 to 250 years old, that are probably about five feet across.

We have three or four buckets on them.

Religiously, every time you go there, every one of those buckets will be running over.

So we can boost yield without hurting the trees.

But there is one challenge that someone wanting to get a piece of this maple action has to deal with.

We depend on collecting sap from mature, large trees, you know, trees that are 10 inches in diameter and greater, and often that means that that tree is at least 30 years old, if not more than that.

Because it takes so long, people don't intentionally plant maple groves for the syrup.

Tig at Crown Maple told me that a lot of times, when there are a lot of maples in one place, they got there sort of by accident.

And if you look at a seed of a maple tree, it looks like a little helicopter.

So when you have open fields, one of the first trees that will start propagating onto that open field is a maple because of the way the seeds can fall.

And so it will kind of flutter out of a tree and go out into the field, and then it'll grow a tree, and then you know, another seed will

fall off that and go out farther out.

So that's why when you see a lot of maple, frequently, it was an old farmland that was abandoned, which we think was the case for this property.

So you don't plant maple, although you do tend to it.

You thin out the other trees so that maples have room to grow.

And so if you wanted to try to make a maple buck and you you thought planting was a good idea, you'd have to wait 40 years for those trees to grow.

This is a surprisingly big problem.

Crown Maple really wants to expand, but finding an untapped maple forest is not so easy.

They have real estate scouts actually looking for land.

There are a lot of untapped maple trees, but they're not necessarily in the concentration tappers need.

You have to have a bunch of maple trees together to make collecting maple worthwhile.

Right now, we have a situation: there is a boom in demand for maple, but but a maple tree takes 40 years to be ready to tap.

What to do?

Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

You know that point in the afternoon when you just hit a wall?

You don't have time for self-care rituals or getting some fresh air, so maybe you grab a beverage to bring you back.

But somehow it doesn't do the trick, or it leaves you feeling even worse.

What you need is a quality break.

a tea break.

And you can do that with Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Real brewed tea made in a variety of bold and refreshing flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

With a Pure Leaf Iced Tea in hand, you'll be left feeling refreshed and revitalized with a new motivation to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Time for a tea break?

Time for a Pure Leaf.

This message is brought to you by AppleCart.

Each Apple product, like the iPhone, is thoughtfully designed by skilled designers.

The titanium AppleCard is no different.

It's laser-etched, has no numbers, and it earns you daily cash on everything you buy, including 3% back on everything at Apple.

Apply for AppleCard on your iPhone in minutes.

Subject to credit approval, AppleCard is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch.

Terms and more at AppleCard.com.

Abby and her colleagues developed a new approach.

They planted lots of young maple saplings in an open field, and then they chopped the tops off and stuck bags on them with tubes running out the bottom to suck the sap out.

It is completely freaky looking.

It's like a field of these skinny stick trees with bags over their heads.

But using her system, you can essentially harvest maple sap and produce maple syrup from relatively small and young maple trees that are grown at higher densities in a much closer proximity to one another, very akin to any other type of perennial field crop.

You can do this just clipping the top off each year for a decade, and then you just plow all the baby trees up and start afresh.

Maple producers have mixed feelings about it, Mark told me.

It certainly doesn't have that picturesque kind of old world maple setting to it, I suppose.

Certainly doesn't seem like maple sugar gig to me, but it's probably going to be the way of the future if the demand for maple syrup keeps up the way it is.

So, the benefit of Abby's technique, you can get maple maple syrup from younger trees crowded together in a field like any other farm.

But the downside, right now, maple products help protect open forests.

If a region is used for maple, then that whole ecosystem is conserved.

But there is another potential benefit.

This system might be really useful if the maple range shrinks because of climate change.

We asked Abby what effect climate change might have on our delicious syrup.

Ah, the question is actually: what effect is climate change having, and what effect has it had on on maple production?

So, maple is really,

you can look at it as one of the first and early signs that climate change is actually having an impact.

It is getting warmer, and that means there aren't as many freezing nights.

So, the season has already gotten about three days shorter over the past 45 years.

You know, when you think of the maple production season and realize that it is as short as six weeks, sometimes shorter, that's a very large proportion of the maple production season that we have already lost due to changing climate.

And it keeps getting warmer earlier.

Mark said this year is a new record.

This year is the earliest we've tapped in 61 years

ever in the history of us being here.

The weather is just crazy this year.

Looking forward, Abby told us this means the areas where maple trees can produce the right kinds of sap at the right pressures are moving north.

Various projections and research that has looked at this over time, if you analyze various climate projections, you can see greater production occurring in the northernmost ranges of maple production where it is now.

So basically production increases in places like northern Quebec and reductions in production in more southerly places where maple is made.

That's another thing you can already see happening on the ground.

10-15 years ago, you probably had a couple hundred sugar makers in West Virginia and North Carolina that were making syrup just like us.

That doesn't happen anymore.

There's a handful left because their temperatures have warmed so much they can't do it.

They don't get the freezing nights and warm days.

I could definitely see that being a problem here, too.

And this is where the sapling method could come in really handy because climate change is moving faster than the trees can grow.

There's no point having a boom in demand if climate change means you can't produce enough syrup.

Abbey's sapling technique, as sad as it looks for a tree lover like myself, it might end up being the only thing that can keep the industry growing here in upstate New York and New England.

The Canadians might do pretty well as the range moves north, though, at least temporarily.

This threat couldn't come at a worse time because, like we keep saying, maple is in demand right now.

And the reasons for that are kind of interesting.

It's not just a matter of wanting to preserve the maple forests, or the Asian demand, or the market stability that has allowed Walmart to carry maple syrup all year round.

The guys at Crown told me that people are finally beginning to think beyond the pancake and get creative with maple.

They gave me a maple-dusted potato chip with some maple-infused beer to make their planto with all that.

It was great.

I was basically in maple heaven by then.

Plus, on top of these culinary uses, there's a sense that as a natural plant product, maple might be better for you than corn syrup or other kinds of highly processed and purified sweeteners.

We wanted to learn more about that, so we called up Navindra Siram.

He's a chemist at the University of Rhode Island who specializes in finding beneficial chemicals in plants.

He told us the use of maple for health reasons goes back millennia.

Well, we did a little bit of digging and we looked into some of the old books that were really the ethnomedicinal and ethnobotanical books where the indigenous people, there was very good data that apparently they would take different parts of the maple species, and by these I mean sugar maple and red maple, etc.

They would take the bark, they will boil it, they will drink it as a liver tonic.

So Navindra did what he does.

He took maple into the lab and he separated out all the little trace elements, all the polyphenols and the minerals and the amino acids, all the beneficial compounds.

We're over 60 and still counting.

These compounds are in pretty small quantities in the maple syrup itself.

But what's really interesting to Navindra is that maple has some of the best compounds from a bunch of different types of plants.

It's like a greatest hit.

Plants produce a lot of compounds, so that wasn't surprising.

What was more surprising was that we found a cocktail or a diversity of compounds which we knew belong to different healthy plant foods.

So for example, if you look within cruciferous cabbage family, you find similar chemistry also if you look within the berries you know blueberries and blackberries you find a similar chemical class of compounds flax is another group we found that maple had a little bit of compounds from different healthy plant foods and so navindra's next step was to see whether these maple compounds had any medicinal potential and it turns out they probably do it looks like one compound in maple might be a good antimicrobial that could help combat drug-resistant infections.

Another could potentially help out with Alzheimer's by reducing plaque formation.

Another inhibits the growth of some types of cancer cells.

These are all super early studies, but basically there's a lot going on.

Maple's looking pretty good.

Some of the compounds Novendra found were completely new to science, too, including one he named Kebicol after the Canadian province.

It's a little different from the others.

It was produced during the cooking process.

But Quebecol is not an aroma compound.

It's not a flavor compound.

It's really a phenolic compound that's formed during the processing of maple syrups.

And Kepicol looks like it might turn out to be pretty useful, too.

When we look at the structure of Kepicol, we started seeing very interesting similarities between a well-known drug called tamoxifen.

And tamoxifen is widely used as a chemotherapeutic drug against certain types of breast and ovarian cancer.

There are also studies in animals that seem to show that maple syrup and maple sugar aren't quite as bad for blood sugar levels as refined cane sugar is.

Novindra thinks there might be other substances in maple that help mediate the biological effects of the sugars, and so it might be somewhat better for diabetics than normal sugar.

Navindra is intrigued, but that said, We have always said don't guzzle, but drizzle, because it's still a sweet nerd, still has a lot of sugar.

Yes, this is not a license to pour maple syrup down your throat, although I, for one, wouldn't judge you.

But Navindra was really clear.

This is early days in the research.

The studies haven't been done in humans, just in test tubes.

And we have no idea idea how much syrup you'd have to consume to get any of these beneficial effects.

But that hasn't stopped maple water folks from jumping on the coconut water bandwagon and saying how great it is for your health.

Wait a minute, wait a minute.

What is maple water?

We've talked maple sugar, we've talked maple syrup, we've talked maple sap.

What is maple water?

Maple water is the sap that comes from the tree.

It's what is normally boiled down to make maple syrup, but it can also be used as a beverage straight out of the tree.

And lots of people people do it, especially sugar makers who want a nice, refreshing, little bit of a sweet drink when they're working in the woods.

We've heard from Michael Farrell already.

He's the maple specialist at Cornell University, and his latest project is to help the maple water industry take off.

He says they call the sap water because nobody wants to drink sap.

His first step was to come up with a better technique to quickly sterilize and package maple water.

Normally, the sap has to be boiled into syrup within the day because it's sugary bacteria love it, and so it spoils easily.

But with that problem out of the way, Michael sees a bright future for maple producers to get into the functional water business.

I think it could and eventually it should be as big or bigger than coconut water.

I mean there's a lot of advantages of maple water over coconut water especially here in the Northeast.

You know it's local, it's lower in sugar, it tastes better.

You know, we've done various research projects looking at people's preferences on the flavor of maple water versus coconut water.

And if the maple water always wins, more people prefer it over coconut water.

And as far as the nutritional profile, it doesn't have as many minerals in it as coconut water does, but it also doesn't have nearly as much sugar in it either.

Just to be clear, coconut water producers have had to step back from some of their over-the-top health claims.

But like we heard from Navendra, maple does have health benefits.

No one knows how much of these beneficial compounds you're getting when you drink very dilute maple water, but the way Michael looks at it, it can't hurt.

The main reason Michael's excited about maple water, though, is it has the potential to take the maple business to an entirely new level.

The market for beverages is much greater than the market for syrups.

They're not even on the same scale.

You know, people drink a lot more beverages than they do use some type of syrup.

So, you know, it's a bigger market opportunity.

The potential for profit margins is greater.

This really will be a maple boom if it takes off.

As we've heard, that could transform the landscape in the Northeast.

More money for maple producers can translate into more forests preserved.

But down the line, it could also mean a shift towards farming maple just like any other crop, with those saplings with bags on their heads.

There are so many factors at play here.

You've got climate change, you've got economics, you've got technological and farming improvements.

I have to say, Nikki, I hate stories that end with, who knows what the future holds, but really.

Who knows?

All we can say, I think, is that maple is having a moment in lots of different ways.

And we think that moment tastes great.

For now, we can all feel pretty good about joining in that moment.

Here's how our experts recommend that you consume your daily dose of maple.

My favorite way to eat maple syrup is probably, I'm a purist, so I love to have maple syrup on vanilla ice cream.

It just doesn't get much better than that.

To me, nothing beats the good old-fashioned waffle.

I eat at a place here that serves waffles, but I take my own syrup and pour it on the waffles because I don't like the other stuff very much.

But I cook with it a lot.

I mean, I make my own homemade stir-fry and I substitute honey for the maple syrup.

So I use it a lot in our cooking and stuff.

Use it in your vinaigrettes, use it to marinate meats, and adding it to your coffee if you want a sweetener.

But think beyond the pancake.

You know, it's not just a pancake topping.

Think of maple as a serious ingredient that you have in your cabinet that when you're cooking, you bring it out and it gives you that rich bold flavor and, of course, that sweet taste.

So those are some of the ways that we use it.

Of course, I use it in some of my cocktails, etc.

It's kind of really very sweet.

You're a big fan.

I'm personally a big fan of maple syrup and cocktails.

Yep, me too.

It's my favorite way to get all my nutrition cocktails.

Absolutely.

We decided to try that out.

So, what did you make?

So, I made bourbon with some maple syrup and a little splash of maple water and then just a little bit of lime juice.

How about you?

Oh, nice.

I like the lime juice.

That's a good touch.

I had some tequila, a little bit of maple syrup, and then just sort of topped it up to the level of the ice with the

maple water.

And what do you think?

It tastes pretty good, actually.

I mean, what do you think?

It could be bad.

It's bourbon and maple.

I don't know.

Right, this is really like our maple love letter.

But it's hard not to fall in love with something you've seen come from the forest to the cocktail glass.

Well, cheers.

Cheers.

To Maple.

Oh, yes.

This episode, I was lucky enough to go up to Dover Plains, New York, and visit Sukup Farms in Crown Maple.

I owe Jennifer and Mark Sukup a huge thanks, as well as Ty Grogenstein, Michael Cobb, and the team at Crown Maple.

If you get the chance to visit their sugar houses or any sugar houses during the season, I highly recommend it.

The process of making maple syrup is fascinating.

I've put photos from my visit and links to their farms on our website, gastropod.com.

We also need to thank Abby Vandenberg of the University of Vermont Proctor Maple Research Center, Navendra Siram of the University of Rhode Island, Michael Farrell of Grinnell University, and Douglas Wynot, author of The Sugar Season.

Tell us what you think of maple water and how you like to enjoy maple syrup by emailing us at contact at gastropod.com, leaving a voicemail at 310-876-2427, tweeting us at Gastropodcast, or writing on our Facebook page.

We'd love to hear from you.

And we're back in two weeks with an episode inspired by a listener question.

We'll be exploring the science and history of caffeine, which is pretty much what Gastropod runs on, to be honest.

Till next time.

This month on Explain It To Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes, and fitness trackers.

But what does it actually mean to be well?

Why do we want that so badly?

And is all this money really making us healthier and happier?

That's this month on Explain It To Me, presented by Pureleaf.