Can Maple suryp be made in Europe from European or Americian Maple trees?

Question

I have heard that Maple syrup cannot be made in Europe. I have also heard that Maple syrup came from Europe.
What is the truth?

Answer 1

maple syrup COULD be made from any Maple but only Sugar Maple has sap that will make good maple syrup ( and it is an American variety - it needs very cold winters to produce the sap flow that makes good syrup so Sweden perhaps but not the UK )

took a quick look at the history - first known Maple Syrup was - sinzibuckwud in the Algonquin Indian language - meaning 'drawn from the wood' - so an American original

Answer 2

I have read that very fine maple syrup can be made from the sap of almost any maple tree, but the Sugar Maple is the best, producing the highest guality and the highest quantity. The Sugar maple is native to the eastern USA and Canada, and the technology and industry for making maple syrup and maple sugar was given to the colonists by the native indians of the area. It is also true that the climate of the northeastern US and eastern Canada is ideal for causing the trees to "gush forth" with spring sap, since the winters are very cold and the springs are very warm, making quite a temperature contrast. For this reason, even though Sugar maples can be grown in places like say Georgia, USA, they will not produce the correct sap flow, and I have heard that the farthest south that maple syrup can be grown effectively as an agricultural crop is Highland County, Virginia, which is high in the Appalachian mountains. Further south, forget it, even if the trees grow fine there. So Europe may not be a very good place either, due to the lack of temperature contrast between the seasons. Maybe the southern slopes of the Alps might have a good enough temperature contrast, I don't know. And then there is always global warming, which is supposed to make the winters in Europe become progressively colder and the summers hotter. So maybe you could just wait a few decades and see what the climate turns up.

Answer 3

The short answer is that in theory it could be but there are reasons it is not realistic or commercially viable, which is why it is not.

Maple syrup can be made of any species of maple, and even from some species of trees other than maples. However, there is a different amount of sugar content in each species, and each has its own characteristic taste. The sugar maple (Acer saccharum), which is native only to North America, has three factors that make it very good for syrup production:

* high sugar content in the sap, so you need to use less to produce the same amount of syrup
* produces good tasting syrup. Many people complain that other trees (like sycamores) that can be used for syrup don't taste as good.
* high sap production. This is due partly to sugar maples' environments--they grow in very moist woods--but also due to their ability to do something called "hydraulic lift"--they actually draw water from the water table on a daily basis. Trees that cannot do this cannot produce nearly as much sap.

The black maple (Acer nigrum), also native to North America, also makes good syrup. It is very closely related to the sugar maple and can even hybridize with it.

Keep in mind that even for a sugar maple, you need about 20 gallons of sap to produce a quart of syrup. For other species of trees, you need much more sap--as high as 150 gallons for some species.

In Europe there are totally different species of maples, including the so-called "Field Maple" (Acer campestre), "Sycamore Maple" (Acer pseudoplatanus), etc. In the U.S. we have a variety of species including striped maple (Acer pensylvanicum), red maple (Acer rubrum), and silver maple (Acer saccharinum). Although all of these can produce syrup, and some are better than others, none of them are as commercially feasible. As sugar maple is a slow-growing tree that is fairly particular about its conditions (it likes mature forests, and it associates with American beech trees, another slow-growing, mature-forest species native only to North America), it does not grow well as a plantation crop, so is not feasible to commercially harvest maple sap in areas where it does not grow natively.

Europeans did not discover or invent the process of making maple syrup--Native Americans originally discovered the process of making it, and shared this knowledge with Europeans who modified and refined it into the process we have today.