Birch sap, new health trend.

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Charlotte987

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Jan 6, 2015
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Apparently, if you leave the birch trees standing you can tap them for birch sap and sell the sap, maple sap too. Soda sales are down and tree water is trendy these days. I now feel guilty burning birch and maple, I could have tapped those trees and sold their sap. Oh well, I like coffee and being warm better than tree sap. Don't know why but I always thought about birch as a tree that should be cut down eventually.

Have any of you drunk birch sap or maple sap? As a kid I drank lots of maple sap, used to drive my Dad nuts, as he wanted to boil it all for syrup.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/0...-birch-waters-on-the-rise-as-soda-sales-sink/
 
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I came across a video on youtube (shocker) awhile back, a native guy was tapping the birch trees with little plastic cups and duct tape! He mentioned drinking it, and even simmered some down. He was also eating a beaver, bannock, and beans in another of his videos!

This might be the one. Language warning.



Beaver and bannock.:eek:
 
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Maple sap can be readily converted to maple syrup. I bet everyone knows what that is. It is a very heat intensive process. My cousin makes prize winning maple syrup in Quebec, just north of Vermont, but I have seen how much wood he has available to run his sugaring effort. I bet he burns at least a full 4 inch split for every ounce of syrup he produces. His tapping method is not quite as crude as in the videos posted by saskwoodburner. He uses actual taps and runs them through small bore tubing to a large collection container. His father used to hang individual buckets on each tree, just like you have seen on old time sugaring pictures, but that meant going out and collecting many 2 or 3 quart containers of sap and dumping them into a large container to bring them back to the sugar shack by hand. His sugaring operation is a pan of maybe 5 gallons capacity that he uses to boil down the raw sap into syrup or sugar. Because the volume keeps decreasing, he has the ability to move the boiled sap from one area to another so he can start on the next raw sap batch while the previous one is not yet finished. It makes for a more efficient boil to be able to separate the batches.
Note: Not any old maple makes a good tree to tap for making maple syrup. Anything but a sugar maple is probably a waste of time although almost any maple can be used to produce some maple syrup. It takes those warm days and cold nights to really get the sap to run well. If you don't have that you can count on disappointing results from tapping a tree. The daily temperature cycle is what gets the sap flowing up and down a tree. The down flow is what you tap with a maple.
 
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