birch sap

Yesterday my neighbour had her silver birch brutally hacked because the leaves were clogging her gutters. I went to inspect and thought it was starting to rain. The sap was dripping on my head from the wounds above. I have set out some jars to collect some of it but most is running down the trunk and into the earth and the tree is bleeding to death. The sap has little flavour. As per instructions, I bored a cork sized hole at an 80 degree angle into the trunk and inserted a bored synthetic cork with a tube connected to a demijohn, which is collecting a small amount of sap, but mostly it is bleeding out of the wounds above. Hopefully these wounds will self heal. A proper tree surgeon would have advised against pruning at this time.
Meanwhile I could possibly harvest enough sap to justify an experimental brew. Following the classic Berry recipe, this involves cooking a gallon of sap with orange and lemon rind, topping up with water, adding the juice of the citrus fruits plus some white grape juice concentrate. Smacks of the the old 'Stone Soup' story to me: place stone in boiling water, add salt, pepper, bones, cabbage leaves and so on. Yet thousands of birch trees died in the process of peasants relentlessly bleeding them to death.

etc, etc.

anyway, that's great - it is very very late this year.

you should only tap a tree once every THREE YEARS - not yearly. you can kill the tree, and once it's gone, it's gone.

if you find a good tree, and take it from me i'm not making this up, you can get a full 5 gallons from it, my dad's mate tapped one in his back garden and couldn't keep up! it's gotta be a big 'un at just the right time, and it'll gush like a damn waterfall. go have a good look around, i think parks and canals would be better than fields...don't bother with the pansy thin ones.

Thanks for that. Was the wine any good?

The sap froze last night, which helps the tree, I guess, but at this rate it's going to take a very long time to collect a gallon!

I tried to cauterise the wounds with a blowlamp but the wind kept blowing it out. I treated it with Arbrex but it continues to bleed. Meanwhile I have half a gallon of sap collected. Don't try this at home!

stu said:

Personally, I would have started a new thread and linked to the old one.

Click to expand...

Since you've chucked your hat in the ring, I'm curious to know why ? The valuable information upthread will be harder to find, and anyone stumbling on the old thread will have no link to the new one.

I've been looking out for silver birches round me but the only ones I see are in people's gardens... :twisted:

tonyhibbett said:

I tried to cauterise the wounds with a blowlamp but the wind kept blowing it out. I treated it with Arbrex but it continues to bleed. Meanwhile I have half a gallon of sap collected. Don't try this at home!

Click to expand...

Just leave the tree to heal itself.

Trees have very complex and effective systems to wall off wounds. Cauterising with a blowtorch will simply cook and kill the cells nearest the wound preventing them from occluding the wound.
Arbrex has not been professionally used nor recommended for over a decade. It was proven that wound paints actually encouraged and expedited decay in most tree species.

Tapped birch trees will not bleed to death. Birch trees pruned at this time of year will suffer no more than if they had been pruned during any other season. Birch are very prone to decay, especially in the upper crown areas hence why pruning, unless absolutely essential is not to be encouraged.

Tapping a tree for its sap once a season will cause it little or no harm.

Leave the one you have tapped/cauterized, painted with Arbrex alone now and it will sort itself out hopefully.

If you tap any tree for its sap just leave it alone to heal itself.

Over the last 15 years as an arborist I have seen and heard remarkable myths and folklore about trees, the majority of which is tosh.

Trees do not and never will bleed to death :)

Rest easy and enjoy your sap :thumb: :

Thanks for that. Interesting about Arbrex. It seemed to disappear from the shelves but is now back, possibly reformulated. The tree is still dripping but no longer from the 'tap', which only yielded about 2 pints.

The tree continues to drip and after 7 days I had a gallon of sap. It has almost no flavour. I started preparing as per the recipe in First Steps but found that with the pound of (minced) raisins and 1 pound of sugar, the sg was already 1070, so the 3 pounds suggested would make an unbearably sweet wine. It also says use strong bottles with tied down corks, which suggests a sparkling wine is expected.
I used the juice of the oranges and lemons as a yeast starter and the brew is now fermenting with the aid of extra nutrient.

The brew is going well. It is curious stuff. Although the raw sap is fairly tasteless and apparantly contains a very small amount of sugar, less than 1%, even at this stage, the brew has an alluring flavour. No water has been added, only that which has been processed by the tree itself.
I now have another gallon of sap to brew as the tree continues to drip from its wounds. It has a light, pleasant taste, with an sg of 1005. Apparantly it goes 'off' in a few days, which could be an issue now the weather is creeping up above Arctic conditions. Since the recipe requires simmering with orange and lemon peel for 20 minutes, it will be totally sterile.
I rarely do 1 gallon experiments, so it's nice to have that old glugging noise from the fermentation trap again. The must is light brown. The initial brew has fermented down to sg 1040 and I have added more sugar to produce a medium dry wine of 12% abv. The volume is now 5.4 litres, so what does not fit in the fv will make the starter for the next gallon. I got a 400 g pack of californian raisins, lemons @ 20p and sugar at 85p per kg from Aldi. Rather than laboriously chopping the raisins, I ran them through the blender until it stopped. I considered using white grape juice instead but realised that the birch sap was actually enhanced water and decided against it for the time being. Ideally, 1 of the 2 oranges required should be a Seville, but I have no idea where you can get them. Possibly a couple of tablespoons of chunky marmalade could do the trick.
It seems you can also harvest sycamore sap. This is interesting news because there is one which has established itself on the rear access path, partially blocking the way and would be a huge and difficult job to remove. However, if it could be tapped to make wine, I could regard it as a resource rather than an obstruction.

might have a go at this, just need to find some tree's. lol

Mincing the raisins has resulted in a 2 inch layer of sediment. Concentrate would have been better, although at £2.50, more expensive. With the oranges, lemons, sugar, yeast, nutrient and finings the cost would be well over £5, around £1 per bottle. I guess this is the current cost of a country wine where the main ingredient is free! If you were to add UK duty and VAT, labour, bottling, labelling and transport costs...

Straining reduced the sediment to half an inch without significantly reducing the liquid. Meanwhile, by tomorrow, I will have another gallon of sap. This time I will use concentrate instead of raisins as I already have a 900g can. The recipe states half a pint. This is actually almost half the can, which contains a certain amount of added glucose.
I have treated the wounds with a second application of Arbrex. The flow is now mostly from a single cut bough, which makes it easier and less wasteful to collect.

Slight hiccup. When I went to collect more sap, I seemed to have considerably more than expected. I checked the rain gauge to find that 5.3 cms fell last night. Since I am using open containers, the sap is significantly diluted!
This time I used 1/2 pint of white concentrate instead of 1 pound of raisins, so the must is yellow rather than brown.

As the ground temperature rises, the sap keeps on pumping. It's like having a well. I have now deployed a large fermenting bin to collect the sap, along with other containers. As a result, I am getting more than a gallon a day. Production has now reached a typical 30 bottle wine kit and rising.
I tested the sap and found it had a pH of 5.7, rather more acidic than I expected. So I tested the original must and found it was 3.3. This is way outside the acceptable limits, but most of this is citric acid and likely to reduce. True enough, the incomplete first brew was down to 3.6.

I have 'normalised' the whole lot into a 30 bottle brew by pouring into a bin. The current sg is 1040. Meanwhile the 'gusher' is yielding 2 gallons per day. That's 7 gallons so far! In a couple of days I can fill my 10 gallon barrel with fermenting wine, something I aspired to as part of its conditioning.

The flow of sap is slowing down, thankfully. 8.5 gallons is a lot to process. I went to Wilkinsons today to top up with gjc, only to find the only pure stuff available came in cans of 220g at £2.75 each. That's £18 per litre! So down to Aldi for raisins at 99p per 400g. and sugar at 85p per kilo. This keeps costs down to 50p a bottle. There may not be quite enough to fill the 10 gallon barrel but I can top it up with some of this naff Wilco white and the half gallon of naff white pomace wine from last year. I hope the tree survives the trauma.

The other possible choice for concentrate was to buy a Wilco 30 bottle kit, on offer at £18. I checked the contents of the can: 1.7 kg, of which 46% grape juice concentrate, and the rest glucose syrup and sugar. This equates to 600 ml of gjc., or 1 pint. Not much of a deal. It's the equivanet to 4 pints of grape juice to make 5 gallons of 'wine', a ratio of 1:10! This makes Winebuddy look generous at 1:5.
This makes me wonder about the amount of glucose in the Youngs Definitive stuff, which is not stated, nor for that matter all the 30 bottle kits I've used. At least with Californian raisins you are not only getting 100% grapes, they are also used in winemaking. A pound of raisins in my gallon of sap is the equivalent of 1:4.

Although I expected the citric acid level to drop, I didn't expect such dramatic results. The initial pH was 3.3 and after 2 weeks fermenting it's now 3.8, which doesn't sound much of a change, but titration indicated an acidity of 3 ppt (as sulphuric), which is verging on bland.
The 5 gallon batch has slowed right down at 1020, so I added 2 teaspoons of Wilco yeast nutrient and got an instant reaction.The brew is now revived. This stuff is not merely diammonium phosphate. There are 7 other ingredients.
I now have 8 gallons on the go with 2 more gallons of sap to get started.
Using the cheap Aldi raisins, oranges, lemons and sugar, the final cost will be under 40 p per bottle. It tastes quite pleasant and lingers on the palate, which is a very good sign, but far too sweet at this stage.

The sap has almost stopped flowing, thankfully. I now have 10 gallons fermenting and a gallon of spare sap. I will boil this down to 10%, which should have a sugar content of 7%, and store it for future use as an additive.
The main batch has picked really well, thanks to the nutrient, and has dropped to 1015, so will soon be ready for racking and secondary fermentation. The acidity has stabilised at pH 3.8. Most of the commercial wines I tested are around 4.0.
18 days so far. Looks like I will finally have a use for all those bottles I stored up for what turned out to be lousy grape harvest last year.