Birch trees bring a unique beauty to your property with their speckled white coloring and papery textured bark. Birch are also fast-growing, so they can be used to create shade where it’s needed. They’re even used for crafts. But amazingly, birch trees can also double as an alternative tree for sugar tapping!
Make no mistake—sugar maples are the king of tapping season. During late winter or early spring, countless farmers across New England and the upper Midwest trek out into the fading snow to tap maple trees. The collected sap (which is a liquid) has a mild, diluted sugary flavor when raw, but when the sap is boiled, the moisture content evaporates, leaving the condensed, sugary syrup that maple trees are so prized for.
Why Birch Trees Can Be Tapped for Syrup
The reason sugar maples work the best—and the reason for their name—is because the sugar content of their sap is quite high. You only need about 40 gallons of sugar maple sap to create a gallon of syrup, among the best of any tree out there. But if you’re willing to work a little harder—and don’t mind a slightly different taste—you can tap birch trees and make syrup in the same manner.
Birch tree sap has a lower sugar content, so you’ll need upwards of 100 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup. That’s twenty 5-gallon pails! It’s a lot of work to tap that much sap, but it may be worth the effort. Here are four reasons why.
1. You don’t have sugar maples on your land. If you don’t have maples, maybe you have mature birch trees, and you’d like to try tapping even though they aren’t the prime sugar species.
2. You live outside the range of sugar maples. Some far northern regions of the U.S. and Canada are too cold for sugar maples, but birch absolutely thrives there. Birch tapping is quite popular in Alaska.
3. You want to extend your tapping season. Birch trees often need warmer spring temperatures than sugar maples to prompt sap flow. As a result, birch trees may be just starting to run as the maple season ends—so you gain a few more weeks of harvesting.
4. You just want to experiment with something fun and different! Birch sap and syrup taste different—more savory—and it’s just a fun and cool experience to tap trees other than sugar maples.
How to Tap Birch Trees
It’s easy to start tapping your birch trees in the spring. Just select healthy mature trees at least 8” in diameter and drill a short hole with a 5/16” or 7/16” drill bit—the standard sizes for a tree tap. Drilling into the south-facing (sunny) side of the tree can help. Use standard sap collecting equipment (bags, etc…), and then keep your sap refrigerated until you’re ready to boil it down.
In short, birch trees offer you a different opportunity for tapping—not necessarily better than maple trees, but supplemental. Have fun!
This article was written for Hobby Farms magazine. Click here to subscribe.
