There is one thing I love, REAL Maple Syrup… I can drink it right from the bottle, eat it by the spoon full, or put a little in my coffee. I use it when I do a cleanse and love it on pancakes and crepes. I love it as a candy and as granulated sugar substitute.
My first experience with tapping trees for sap was when I visited Alex Kilgore outside of Boone North Carolina. We were walking his property talking about hunting and sharing stories when I saw his buckets hanging from the sugar maples on his property. He told me about the process and went and got two glasses with ice and poured some of the fresh sap out of the bucket over the ice and handed it to me. OH MY GOD! it was the most wonderful beverage to enjoy with a friend.
Since then I have learned a little bit about it and that there are several trees you can collect sap from and process it into syrup. Several different types of Maples, each differing in degree of sweetness, as well, many different ways of tapping them, naturally compared to conventional methods.
Now that our office resides in this sweet little cabin tucked away into the woods surrounded by maple trees, and we have a few groups of eager to learn teenagers, we have decided to venture down the road of collecting an processing sap for syrup making. In the fall we collected acorns, processed, leached, ground and cooked with them and now in the early spring we will do the same with maple sap.
The best thing about this line of work is that I get to work with and teach people who have varying levels of skills, experience, and expertise. The benefit of being surrounded by these people is that we are each always learning and growing, becoming more and more knowledgeable. One of my favorite things about teaching is learning along side our students. It helps role model a level of humility and reinforces that we are all equals. As my mentor, Tom Brown Jr, once said during his Expert Tracking class, “the best thing about teaching tracking is that you have 50 different points of view, and every class i learn something new from my students and they way they see things.” That statement has stuck with me as one of the most powerful lessons I learned from him.
Submitted by Bill Kaczor – co-founder and ED of Ancestral Knowledge