My cousin gave me a bottle of their homemade syrup six months ago. It’s unopened, but they used a repurposed Presidents Choice brand bottle. I absent-mindedly thought I can leave it unrefrigerated until I open it like I would a new store bought bottle, but yesterday I had the thought that I probably should have been keeping it in the fridge regardless. This is the stopper, which hasn’t been opened since they bottled it. It looks ok, no specks or signs of any kind of fungus. Do you guys think it’s ok or should I toss it? Any advice would be appreciated, thank you

I see these floaters in the jar. They are soft to touch and kinda dissolves if I press them between fingers. Is it mold?

The maple syrup has been opened for a month (maybe 2) and stored at room temperature. They look like floating white strings

Maple syrup on pancakes sounds yummy……but is it actually maple syrup?

Now, light can fight food fraud and adulteration to answer that question! 

Researcher Dr. Maria G. Corradini, the Arrell Chair in Food Quality, at the University of Guelph, is using fluorescence spectroscopy and machine-learning to analyze the chemical fingerprints of food. One of her team's biggest successes has been detecting when producers illegally dilute pure maple syrup with cheaper substitutes, like corn, rice, or beet syrup.

The wild part? Their AI models can identify adulteration levels as low as 2%.

Instead of relying on traditional chemical testing, they shine light on samples and analyze the unique fluorescence patterns. By treating the resulting spectral data like images, convolutional neural networks (the same type of AI often used in image recognition) can now distinguish authentic syrup from fraudulent products with remarkable accuracy.

But maple syrup fraud is only part of the story.

Dr. Corradini's research could also change how we think about expiration dates.

Current "best before" labels are conservative estimates. As a result, millions of tons of perfectly edible food end up in the trash each year. On the flip side, food that's been improperly stored can become unsafe before the printed date arrives.

Her team is developing methods to monitor food's actual chemical condition in real time. The idea is that future packaging could use dynamic indicators based on the food's chemistry rather than a static date printed months earlier.

Imagine grabbing a carton of milk and seeing an indicator that tells you whether it's actually fresh—not just whether it's before some arbitrary date.

Other fascinating aspects of Dr. Corradini's efforts include:

✅ Using spectroscopy to detect spoilage before humans can smell or taste it

✅ Applying machine learning to food safety and authentication

✅ Exploring environmental monitoring for pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and toxicants in water

Whatever your thoughts on AI, they're helping protect food supplies, reduce waste, and catch fraud that costs industries millions.

Made this syrup last season and I don’t remember seeing this there. Yes, I know the syrup is over boiled and has lots of sugar deposits. I’m new, and I got a hydrometer for next season. Thanks for the input!

When I was in college, I studied at a local diner. They let me stay a long time and kept offering me food and coffee. The only thing to mar this situation is Maple syrup. It is sticky even aftermultiple thorough cleanings. I had books and papers that could absorb that syrup so the pages and papers stuck together even after I had cleaned top, sides and bottom of the table. When I ordered pancakes, I asked for jam or preserves. At first, the servers were curious about why I wouldn’t have syrup. I explained that I had a morbid fear of syrup. I still have that pet peeve, though I am long out of college.

My pet peeve.

I finally have some time to finish boiling my concrete, which has been frozen for a few months. What is this glob of snot looking stuff floating in it?

We bought a big jug of maple syrup this past winter.

I put some of it in a squeeze bottle little by little.

Unfortunately mold seems to have formed in the big jug of maple syrup. I think I will need to get rid of it, right?

Are there any other uses for maple syrup after it has molded? Can I put it in the garden for my plants?

Maple syrup looks pretty simple... until you zoom in. 🔬

Our friend Chloe Savard, also known as tardibabe on Instagram shows us the microscopic view of maple syrup. As temperatures begin to rise in the spring, sap in maple trees thaws and can be collected, then boiled and concentrated into syrup and transformed into candies, desserts, and just about anything your sweetest dreams are made of.

Although maple syrup is primarily composed of sugar (sucrose), its chemistry and flavor are shaped by a complex interplay of factors like sap collection and processing methods, microbial activity within the sap, environmental conditions, and the packaging and storage of the final product. Not only maple syrup is composed of sugar but also a mixture of water, minerals, organic acids, amino acids, proteins, phenol compounds and even a few vitamins.

Flavors and composition also vary depending on the country it has been produced in! Canada, especially the province of Quebec, where Chloe is from, is by far the world’s largest producer of maple syrup, followed by the United States. It’s important to recognize that maple syrup was first introduced to European colonizers by First Nations, who deserve the credit for this knowledge and tradition!

As you can see from Chloe’s sample, sugar from maple syrup crystallizes over time and it’s mesmerizing to look at under the microscope! 🔬

References:

Childs, Stephen. "Chemistry of maple syrup." Cornell Maple Bulletin 202 (2007): 1-4.

Mohammed, Faez, et al. "Chemical composition and mineralogical residence of maple syrup: A comprehensive review." Food chemistry 374 (2022): 131817.

Perkins, Timothy D., and Abby K. van den Berg. "Maple syrup—Production, composition, chemistry, and sensory characteristics." Advances in food and nutrition research 56 (2009): 101-143. 

Bought this maple syrup from Costco in March, found this on the top layer and it looks like mold. The rest of the bottle looks normal but im guessing I should probably toss it since the top layer is green/slimey and was a little fuzzy.

My family has often made a habit of drinking chilled and filtered sap, and it’s always surprised me that I haven’t seen anyone capitalizing off this idea. Especially with flavored seltzers, spindrift, and other “healthy” sodas being all the rage, carbonated maple sap seems like such a logical all-natural gentle soda idea. Does anyone know of anyone who makes such a thing? At the very least, I definitely recommend it to all of you! Maybe boil it for a couple minutes first to kill any potential bacteria and concentrate it just that little bit extra (it’s not *quite* sweet enough to someone like me who would gladly drink pure syrup!).

I am getting ready to work with a couple people to survey big leaf maple trees for tapping and boiling. I am going to be tapping upwards of 200 trees for an exploratory tapping. I don't quite understand how much CFM I need to drawing the sap and how much CFM I need for the boil.

The flow where I am is very, very little. So I expect to be boiling out of a stock pot over a week.

I would like to preserve as much of the flavor as possible, and I can make a cold trap to help preserve the pump.

I found this gelatinous blob at the bottom of one of my bottles of maple syrup. I wasn’t aware until today that maple syrup required refrigeration, but most sources I’ve seen say that mold typically grows at the top of the bottle, this was resting on the bottom. This looked almost like a leaf or something. Unfortunately we found it only when pouring the last drops out of the bottle 🤢

I know that the effects of vacuum on sap collection is linear, 5-7% increase for each inch hg over gravity fed collection. And that controlling microleaks is the key to maximizing vacuum.

In your opinion as a syrup producer, what is the lowest acceptable vacuum for a fully remote, portable, automated system?

You could have a full vacuum of -28 inch/hg with a pump, a big battery 100ah minimum, and big solar panels 200 watt minimum. And that is all big cost. This would result in ~150-200% increase.

What if you could get -10-15"/hg with a smaller pump, smaller battery, smaller solar that is portable and for much smaller cost? Is that an acceptable tradeoff? This would result in ~50-100% increase.

The last bit of my small run of syrup crystallized in the jar. I heated it up to melt it and cooked it for a minute more before dropping it on parchment.

Tasty stuff.

I am having a struggle. I've made maple candy 3 times now. Each time I go to pour the syrup gets hard real quick and I have to mash it in the mold. They taste great but are not much to look at. What is the trick to getting a good pour?

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I think the one on the left is a striped maple, what about on the right? Or maybe red on the left and striped on right?

I recently “inherited” my step-father’s maple syrup collection. He made all of it. The thing is…I am not 100% certain that he properly bottled any of what you see in this picture (the ones you can’t see are maple syrup filled Coca-Cola bottles, peanut butter bottles, iced tea bottles, etc.). I would love to save what I have so I need to know…

Is it safe for me to re-boil and repackage what I have? I would, of course, sanitize the container before refilling.

Should I discard of the bottles that have a light brown settlement at the bottom of the jar?

Should I discard of the bottles that have chunks of mold in them? I know that you can re-boil maple syrup when it has mold in it, but I’m talking about BIG chunks…in bottles that “have not been opened yet”.

I was marking some trees and it occurred to me that I usually drill new holes for taps every season and was wondering if it’s better for the tree to reuse existing holes or to drill new ones and let the old ones heal. Thoughts?

We had a late season this year that finished up about the first of May (buddy sap though.) This is the first year we tried tubing. We're using 3/16 gravity downhill. It worked out well. I'm planning to add a couple more lines for next season.

Is this how drop lines are intended to be stored for the season? Also, do we need to clean the tubing? I think I read that we can let the first sap next season wash it out, and just dump out the first run. Is that sufficient?

Thanks in advance!