Lackawanna County<\/a>, where students turn tree sap into a super sweet maple syrup.<\/p>\nThe journey from tree to jar is not as simple as you may think. In fact, it\u2019s taken centuries of practice.<\/p>\n
\u201cA couple thousand years ago, when the Native Americans discovered it through like holes in the trees, and holes made by like squirrels and birds,\u201d says Dylan Sleter, Keystone College sophomore and biology student.<\/p>\n
Nowadays, those holes in maple trees are manmade.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I’ve liked is using this drill, so we have it at an angle pointing up like this, and you want to have your hand on the back and have it on inverse and just have a smooth motion like that,\u201d says Daryan Brown, Keystone College junior biology student.<\/p>\n
The hole is then clamped to allow for a vacuum-type method to drain the sap from the tree down to the extractor. The 8-hour-plus process of turning it into syrup has begun.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the back corner, there’s a holding tank, so that’s where our sap comes from our sap extractor and the vacuum lines, and then it comes in, and this is like a back pan that heats all of that sap up, but it also raises the sugar content,\u201d a Keystone College student explains.<\/p>\n
The sap straight from a maple tree isn’t as sweet as you may think, with only a 2% sugar content; most of it is just water.<\/p>\n
\u201cYesterday this one sugar maple was producing 3%. That makes us really happy, but whether it’s 2 or 3% or 3 1\/2 or 1 we have to raise it up to 67% or 66% to make a syrup,\u201d says Kelley Stewart, Keystone College Director of Woodlands Campus & Environmental Education Institute.<\/p>\n
Placed in pans, students boil the sap to allow the evaporation process to get rid of all of the water.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut we’re waiting for it to get to zero. Zero for us means that it’s at the boiling point of water. When we see this dial like it’s getting close to zero we start to get really happy because that means we’re getting close to drawing off and getting a syrup,\u201d a Keystone College student says.<\/p>\n
Eventually, that tree sap ends up as the gooey goodness that is maple syrup.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Newswatch 16’s Valeria Qui\u00f1ones was at Keystone College, where students are bringing an age-old practice to life, one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":144941,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[178,180,179],"class_list":["post-144940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144940\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}