My daughter loves watching Curious George. I’m not sure why, unless it is that she gets to see one of her stuffed animals come to life on the screen. In one of the recent episodes, George learned how to make maple syrup. He tapped a tree, gathered sap and then watched it boil down into syrup. George, of course, managed to do all of this in a 12 minute episode, but even the episode depicted it all being done in 8-10 hours. I found that a little far-fetched, but all in all it was pretty informative considering it was a cartoon.
Living in Northeast Ohio, the maple syrup process wasn’t completely unfamiliar to me. The basics were all covered in the Curious George episode. You need to tap the tree with some kind of spigot. Once it is tapped, you need to hang something that will collect the sap. Around here, blue bags are pretty popular. As George learned, sap from the tree doesn’t taste like maple syrup mainly because there is so much water in the sap. To transform it into syrup, you typically boil sap until most of the water is removed. One website I saw said that it took 43 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup!!
So, by this point, I am sure you are wondering how this has any relevance to a water blog. Well many of the people that are in the industry actually use a reverse osmosis system to speed up the process of making syrup. They just use the system opposite of how I would typically think a system works. Typically, your well or municipal water goes through a prefilter and then into a reverse osmosis semi permeable membrane. The membrane separates the water into two streams: a permeate stream (the water you drink) and a drain stream (filled with undesirable contaminants). The permeate stream goes through a postfilter and then to your faucet. If you want a more in depth explanation of reverse osmosis drinking water systems, you can read more about it here. To maple syrup makers, the purified water is actually the waste product! They want what I would typically consider the waste stream. In the “waste” stream, the product is already concentrated so it takes less work (boiling) to make it into maple syrup.
I love seeing people think of creative ways to adapt existing technology to meet their needs.
Source: kinetico