I was just thinking about that last night. I cringe at the thought remembering it. In light of corona virus, it’s a wonder Russian society didn’t collapse of some communicable disease back then.
The dispensers were still around in 1989–90, when I was in Moscow as a grad student. I asked a Russian friend of mine if he wasn’t worried about getting sick drinking from a communal glass, and he said with a grin “I have my own special way of doing it.” Then he just drank from the glass while avoiding lip contact with the rim.
On an earlier visit (1975), I was told by our group chaperone (an American who should have known better) “The problem isn’t with them, it’s with us. We were raised with sterile stomachs.” Yeah, right. Sorry, but my cultural empathy just doesn’t extend that far.
The dispensers were, BTW, pretty much gone when I moved to Russia in 1992. By that time, bottled water being sold in kiosks everywhere.
Took access to maple sap for granted until the family sugar shack became a suburban development forty years ago. A bit off topic, but if you’ll indulge it, besides a tasty drink do you think there might be any undiscovered health benefits for maple and also birch water? Your newfound hobby is an entrenched ritual with more than a few oldsters I talk to, and they don’t seem to be making any wild claims as a possible business, or any scientific claims either. Their health anecdotes come across as “just something you should also do” giving me the uneasy feeling I’m not trying hard enough to do this every spring.
Not the least bit convinced of going over to the dark side of maple syrup consumption, especially when Vasek Pospisil takes shots between games, or Donovan Bennet is just being plain gross, or Raptor Norm Powell’s getting wimpy with it.
Maybe you’re doing it all wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9u6gdwQPD8
I think drinking maple or birch water is much healthier than drinking sweetened commercial sodas or other significantly sweetened beverages. And it’s also much healthier than drinking alcohol. It’s definitely better for you than drinking an equivalent amount of maple syrup!
I seriously doubt it is superior to drinking water if someone is eating an adequate diet. It’s got about 20 calories per 8 oz. serving, 45 mg of sodium, 15 mg of potassium, and very very small traces of other minerals and nutrients. Mineral content will depend on the soil the tree is growing in, frankly.
As noted above.
If I interpret the weather reports right, this spring was/is nearly ideal weather for maple sap collection – cold nights (below freezing) and warm days (above). Has that been the case?
Not that ranch dressing is much of an improvement, perhaps.
Which knowledge I did learn from you, then forgot to cite you as my source. Sorry, my mind is a bit more jumbled lately.
We’ve gotten a lot of product this season for sure, just using essentially two trees. So much that we got sick of making maple syrup and pulled the taps yesterday, after hearing we’d not go below freezing for the foreseeable future, and haven’t for nearly a week. We got at least 35 gallons of sap, and have over 3/4 a gallon of syrup, which is pretty good for a stovetop operation. I am NOT building a sugar shack!
It’s been a nice diversion from work, though. Nice and mindless. We’re saving some sap to serve at some future Wisconsin themed dinner party. 11 year old cheddar, wild rice, cherry rhubarb pie with maple syrup glaze will be among the ingredients.
No problemo! 
A related beverage: raw sugarcane juice.
In regions where sugarcane grows, people will often skin the stalks and chew on them–a tasty treat.
Better still, the farmer will always have a rusty old hand-cranked gear press to squeeze the juice out of the stalks. Part of the process is watching him splash a little water on the tetanus-laden rust contraption, but that is just for show–similar to how one gives a light wire-brushing to the bar-b-cue before grilling steaks to satisfy onlookers.
Then he starts shoving in stalks that have been chopped with a machete (what else?) and turning the crank. A substance that resembles dishwater pours out into whatever container has been provided.
Add ice, and it’s a delicious summer treat.
A true story.
As I noted above, we tapped trees and made syrup when I was young. Some relatives visited us from out of town and were highly impressed. So when they got home, they decided to tap a tree and make their own. But they found that they weren’t getting any sap.
So the next time we visited them, they asked my father to look over what they were doing and see if he could help them. He checked and then told them, “There can be a lot of reasons why you’re not getting sap. It could be the location of the tree. It could be the location of the tap. It could be the weather. It could be the health of the tree.” Then he paused. “But your problem is you tapped an oak tree.”
Yeah, I got offered waaaay too much of that stuff in Costa Rica this January past as we toured the countryside. Seeming a lot like sweetened dishwater, it lost its appeal quickly, tho it was interesting seeing how they processed it in the early days.
<<snerk>>
thanks for sharing that, I smiled. And that takes a bit, these days.
Ran across this at Trader Joe’s as well. Since syrup was an old family cash crop, I researched it a bit.
Turns out that Maple Water is not quite raw sap from the tree. Modern syrup production avoids boiling as the sole concentration step. Now, reverse osmosis is used to remove water from the sap, concentrating the sugar before boiling off the rest of the water.
Maple water is the output from the osmosis step and has less sugar etc. than the sap.
Thanks for that factoid. I appreciate knowing that.
Yeah, interesting to know, and kind of cool that they are able to salvage a waste product like that.