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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works dot com

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Speaker 1: where smart Happens. Hi'm Marshall Brain with today's question, what

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Speaker 1: is maple syrup and how do they make it? Maple

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Speaker 1: syrup comes from the sap of maple trees. Yes, just

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Speaker 1: the normal sap that's running underneath the bark in the

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Speaker 1: early spring. If you cut the bark or drill a

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Speaker 1: hole into certain species of maple trees, clear sap will

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Speaker 1: leak out of the cut. This sap is very thin,

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Speaker 1: almost like water, but it contains about two sugar. If

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Speaker 1: you boil this watery sap to drive off the water,

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Speaker 1: you eventually get maple syrup. It takes thirty to forty

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Speaker 1: gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. One

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Speaker 1: tree might give you ten gallons of sap over the

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Speaker 1: course of four weeks. The best days to collect sap

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Speaker 1: are the days where the temperature is above freezing during

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Speaker 1: the day and below freezing at night prior to bud formation.

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Speaker 1: The sugar or rock maple and the black maple are

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Speaker 1: the two trees that give you the best syrup. Sometimes

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Speaker 1: people also tapped the red maple before people collected the

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Speaker 1: sap in buckets by drilling a hole into the tree

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Speaker 1: and pounding in a wooden tube for the bucket to

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Speaker 1: hang on. Today, most commercial operations use plastic taps and

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Speaker 1: plastic tubing so the sap can flow to a central location.

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Speaker 1: The sap is evaporated in large flat pans that are

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Speaker 1: heated with wood, gas or electricity. Maple syrup is definitely

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Speaker 1: a northern thing to do. Maple syrup comes from places

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Speaker 1: like Quebec and Ontario in Canada, and in the United States,

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Speaker 1: it comes from Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont,

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Speaker 1: and Wisconsin. People in the north where it gets snowy

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Speaker 1: and cold are the kind of people who have maple

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Speaker 1: trees in their backyard. Do you have any ideas or

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Speaker 1: suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an

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Speaker 1: e mail at podcast at how stuff works dot com.

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Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, go

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Speaker 1: to how stuff works dot com. MHM