Is there anything more Canadian than maple syrup? The signature touch of sweetness on our brunch menu is tapped in St Pierre Baptiste, Quebec. Canada produces over 70% of the world’s maple syrup, and Quebec is home to almost 14,000 family maple farms.

Indigenous peoples across the north-east of the continent discovered the benefits of sugar maple sap, and shared their knowledge with early European settlers. Before there were easy storage solutions for sticky syrup, they would often boil the sap all the way down to make maple sugar. Fresh from the tree, the sap is around 98% water – producers must evaporate around 40 litres of sap to make 1 litre of syrup!

Traditional maple taps were pretty simple. Drill a hole into the tree, add a spout, and position a bucket underneath. These days, producers like Gosford Farm use a system of tubes to draw sap efficiently from large areas of trees and transport it to the facility to be boiled and filtered. The result is a delicious, natural product – a culinary gift from the forest!