From sap to bottle: Grading maple syrup

Long before European settlers came to the Americas, Native Americans had been scoring trees and collecting sap in hollow logs with hot rocks to boil it down into syrup. Ten percent of maple syrup producers make 90% commercially produced syrups. Douglas Whynott is a professor of writing at Emerson College and the author of “The Sugar Season: A Year in the Life of Maple Syrup and One Family’s Quest for the Sweetest Harvest.” Maple syrup production reached its peak during the Civil War and had a resurgence in the 1960s, introducing tubing which saved the industry.