Introducing Birch Syrup

Last week I met Ross, a tree tapper, amongst other things. He owns a forest in the Voru region of Estonia, and uses traditional methods to extract the sap from his birch trees to create a delicious birch syrup. At the moment he is the only person in Europe to do this commercially. It is hugely labour intensive, but Ross clearly loves it and the resulting product is worth all the effort involved.

Birch syrup is made in much the same way as maple syrup; rising sap is extracted from the trees in the spring and converted into a syrup using a process of evaporation and reverse osmosis to remove the water. Ross powers his equipment by burning the wood from naturally fallen trees.  He believes the other carbon emissions from his production (transport, bottles etc) is less than that which his forest absorbs, making this a carbon neutral or possibly even carbon negative product.

 

The finished product is unique and delicious.  Depending on when the birch sap is extracted from the trees, the resulting syrup tastes quite different. The early syrup is ideal on pancakes, porridge, or anywhere you might use honey or maple syrup. It is delicate and sweet, with an intriguing woody, caramel, liquorice like flavour.  The syrup extracted later in the season (and by later I only mean a matter of weeks) is used more like a savoury condiment. It has an even greater depth of flavour, is more robust, though still sweet, minerally rather than woody and more savoury than a maple syrup.  Late birch syrup can be used in sauces, dressings and gravies, to flavour home made beer, mixed into gin for a dirty martini or as a substitute for good balsamic. Late birch syrup is almost entirely fructose, giving it a very low glycaemic index. It also contains lots of minerals including calcium, thiamine and magnesium.

It takes around 120 litres of birch sap to create each litre of birch syrup (far far more than with maple syrup which requires only 30-40 litres) and the sap can only be collected for a few weeks each spring, when the birch trees are using sugar to produce new leaves. You can see why this, one of the oldest sources of sugar known to man, is rarely harvested nowadays! Ross only taps his trees every three years and only extracts around 10% of the trees sap each time. This way his forest continues to thrive.  It is coming up to harvest time right now, and Ross is readying himself for a frantic period of tapping. But before he heads back to Estonia, he delivered some birch syrup to Tastes, where it is now on sale.