Trees budding - now what?

[mlaird]

Newbie question here...

I tapped some trees for the first time this year, and have gotten some good sap out of two in my front yard. One is a silver maple, and the other, a red maple. I boiled down about 4 gallons of sap my first weekend (3/5), and about 11 gallons last weekend. So far, so good...

My silver maple is starting to bud quite a lot, especially at the crown. The lower branches show small buds, but not much is happening there just yet. I've read of "buddy" tasting sap if you boil down sap from trees that are budding, but I haven't found any way to detect this off-taste just by examining the sap. Is there some way to tell before I boil it that it is going to taste funny? Can I tell by looking at the tree that it's time to give up on it for the year?

The red maple is starting to bud too, but not as aggressively as the silver maple.

I've collected about 9 gallons of sap this week, so I plan to boil it down tomorrow and will find out what it tastes like. I don't want an unpleasant-tasting surprise :(.

Thanks for any tips!

Michael

[adk1]

pretty much start packing it in!

[mlaird]

Note that both of my batches turned out very light amber in color, not dark at all. In addition, I found this interesting report on the UVM website:
http://cdi.uvm.edu/collections/item/bulletin151&page=3&size=normal

It reports that "buddy" flavor is not from the trees budding, but instead from bacterial contamination. Since my sap is still running clear, and last week's boil produced light amber, I am hopeful for this week, but still wonder if the end result will taste funny or not.

Attached is a shot of my silver maple from last week. I was concerned then, but the syrup turned out okay. I will have to see about this week!

[Russell Lampron]

The buds can get quite large before it has an affect on the flavor of the syrup. You will be able to notice a fishy smell when you are boiling the sap if it is buddy. Buddy syrup will have a burnt taste to it.

At this point I would say that you still have plenty of season left and not to worry about it just yet.

[SilverLeaf]

Until the buds start to pop open and let the little flowers out, you've got little to worry about. You'd be surprised how big those buds swell before they actually pop.

I tap silvers too and as the buds would swell each spring I used to get all worried about getty buddy sap (there's no easy way to tell up front if its buddy - sometimes you can smell it right away, but usually you can't really tell 'til you start boiling it), but in my experience it's just not a big problem. When the buds pop, the tapholes dry up pretty quick. So there's reallly such a small window of time for that that it's not a big deal. You might get a little at the end, but just try to keep your batches smaller towards the end and you won't have to worry about spoiling a big batch.

[KenWP]

My silver maples have had buds since the leaves fell off last fall.I have been boiling off them untill the feelers start to pop out and have had good syrup. I had a batch two years ago that had a taste to them but it went away after a year in the jug and we used it for eveything. So far the season has ended the same day the sugar maples started to bud so bad syrup wasn't even possible from them as they never ran again.

[3rdgen.maple]

Agreed those are not budding they are just swollen. Keep plugging away.

[mlaird]

Well yesterday I boiled down the ~12 gallons from last week, and the end result tasted pretty good, so I think I was getting concerned a bit too soon. However, I am wondering about this coming week. The sap is running a lot today, but those buds on the silver maple are getting really big! Here are a few shots of the tree from yesterday. First, a full view, then zoomed into the top, and then another view of part of the crown from a side angle.

I think I will keep the sap from this tree separate, just in case it turns out to taste funny. It's not like I'm running a big operation where segregating the sap is going to be complicated :). If it tastes funny, at least these photos will help me recognize the stage of budding where the flavor changed for the worse. We'll see! This has been an interesting project.

[KenWP]

They are getting a little fuzzy aren't they.Are the feelers showing yet.Not much time left it looks like.

[mlaird]

They are getting a little fuzzy aren't they.Are the feelers showing yet.Not much time left it looks like.

I can't really tell, since those branches are up so high. Maybe I should get out my long telephoto lens to find out tomorrow :). The lower branches haven't done much of anything yet.

I hope the sap still tastes good, because it was running like crazy this afternoon. I think I got at least a gallon just from noon until 8:00 tonight.

[mlaird]

Are the feelers showing yet?

I pulled out my long lens, and sure enough, there are little feelers poking out of the buds up high. So I have been segregating the sap from my silver maple this week. Yesterday, I did a test boil of about 1 3/4 gallons of sap from that tree that I collected Wednesday and yesterday. It boiled down to only about 1/4 cup of syrup, but a bunch of that was lost in filtering since it was such a small batch. Still, I think it's something like a 60:1 ratio, meaning less than 2% sugar in the sap.

I found that when I first started boiling the sap, it smelled like my wife was boiling vegetables (asparagus maybe?); it didn't smell like the sap did earlier in the season. It looked perfectly clear, however. Once it had been boiled down a bit, it started smelling sweet like usual sap. Toward the end, it was much cloudier than usual, and required more filtering to make it clear.

I tasted it before filtering, and it tasted a bit weird. After filtering, it was much better, but still didn't seem quite normal. So while it may not be a complete waste, it certainly isn't very good syrup-making sap, since it takes so much boiling for so little syrup, and doesn't taste quite as good to boot.

I'll keep trying and see what else happens with this tree. Attached is my telephoto pictures of the buds developing on this tree.

[Brian Ledoux]

Michael,
Like you said, we are in the same boat with the budding silver maples. The buds on my silver maple trees look exactly like the ones in your close up photo. I am going to dump my sap. I don't want to take any chances at all!

Too bad cuz the silvers didn't run all year until now. What a waste. I think the silvers are what caused me to have disgusting syrup my last 2 batches last year. It was march 16 when I got the buddy syrup last year. I thought it was my pans and not being clean enough. Think it was the silvers. -brian

[mlaird]

I ended up with about 4 gallons of budding silver maple sap, so I kept it separate and boiled it down. I ended up with about 3/4 cup of syrup, very light in color, but slightly cloudy despite filtering. The flavor is not objectionable, but it does not taste like normal maple syrup. I brought some into work yesterday for some maple-syruping friends to sample, and one friend described it best when he said it tasted like a Jolly Rancher was in the boil. :) The syrup has a sour, sort of lemony flavor in addition to the normal sweet flavor, and doesn't have the same characteristic maple flavor.

So while I don't think the silver maple is a waste, it isn't producing the syrup I was hoping for. It also isn't giving me a very good ratio - I think it was something like 60 or 70:1, accounting for some filtering and spillage losses along the way.

I wonder if silver maple sap always makes syrup like this, or if it only does this when it's budding?

[mlaird]

Here's what the syrup looks like; the jar on the left is my silver maple "Jolly Rancher" flavored syrup, and the two on the right are my "normal" syrup from my red maples.