“Birch syrup,” she exclaimed. “You mean maple syrup, don’t you?”
Coming from eastern Canada, particularly world-centre of acerculture, Quebec, this does seem obvious. Not so from western Canada. In both British Columbia and Alberta, there are thriving birch syrup businesses, while Manitoba features a commercial birch sap wine.
But before you go rushing out with drill in one hand, bucket in the other, those who are in the practice warn it can be somewhat a son of a birch.
The correct birch is, of course our own paper or canoe birch, Betula papyrifera, beautiful white lady of the northern forests. Her sap commences to “run” in April, just as that of the sugar maple is finishing.
Other birches, more common to the south, have had their sap utilized although this is more dilute and watery. B. lenta, sweet or cherry birch, was the basis of a domestic brew, birch beer, called “old time” even in 1920 by Charles Francis Saunders in his book Edible and Useful Wild Plants. Its cousin, B. nigra, the river birch, yielded an unfermented drink, “as clear and cool as spring water, with an added suggestion of sugar,” suggested Oliver Medsger (Edible Wild Plants, 1939).
Strangely, only Saskatchewan seems immune to the sweet lure. Strange indeed, when it claims Betula papyrifera, the paper birch, as its provincial tree.
Unfortunately, producing syrup from paper birch requires a deal more work as well as fuel. According to experts it is more dilute still than B. lenta. It is only about half as sweet as that obtained from the sugar maple, Acer saccharum. Unlike maple sugar, which is sucrose, birch yields its fructose grudgingly.
It takes 40 litres of maple syrup to make a single litre of syrup. For birch the ratio can reach 120 litres of sap for one precious litre. And while birch can be more common than maple, particularly in the west and north, the average B. papyrifera can be tapped for less than a litre of sap.
Nor are the birch syrup producer’s trials and tribulations over; rather they’ve just begun. It takes skill, experience and perhaps high-tech evaporators to render it down into a potable product. Albertan Warren Bard, interviewed by told the National Post in 1999, described his first-ever batch as, “more like mud."
The dark liquid with a fruity after-taste sells for four or more times the price that of maple, reflecting the increased complexity of production. The Financial Post’s Nathan VanderKlippe described birch syrup as looking like soya sauce, flowing like motor oil and tasting like sweet money.
In yet another twist, vintner D. D. Leobard of St. Boniface, Manitoba, has produced a wine from birch sap that has drawn raves. Introduced in 2005, it has been described as “a Chardonnay blended with a Sauvignon Blanc.” Leobard calls his wine ‘Tansi,’ which apparently means “Hello, how are you?” in Cree, or so he told Maclean’s magazine Amy Rosen.
Better yet, in northern Europe birch syrup is regarded as a natural health product with possible export potential for Canadian producers. No less than Queen Victoria noted in her diary that it was a favourite of her beloved Prince Alberta obtained in his case from the sap of B. pendula, the silver birch of Eurasia.
The sun may have long set on the British Empire but it could be only just rising on the white lady of Canadian forests
