Okay cool Reddit advertisement and all but the best maple syrup is Grade A dark amber from the most local brand your grocery store carries. It’s the richest in flavor because it’s the most boiled down (the lighter the color the waterier it is, so the less sweet if dark amber is too much for you) and the local place means it’s probably not a huge chain so it’ll be better quality. It usually is pretty expensive but it’s absolutely worth it. Maple syrup doesn’t need to be aged, so any sort of bourbon-barrel stuff is pointless. It takes a large batch maybe a week to boil down to dark amber, and, since it’s food, that stuff does expire eventually so you just have that much less time to eat it if it is aged.
Also, when it comes to ethical problems with maple syrup it’s honestly one of the least problematic plant products to exist. You drill a hole in a sugar maple tree, and some of its sap spills out into a bucket or a collection line to be boiled down into maple syrup. It’s like a mosquito bite to this plant. It doesn’t hurt the plant whatsoever in the long run. Then all you have to do is boil the sap down, so there’s no more ethical issue really to that than there is to charging your phone or doing laundry. Sugar maples don’t need to grow to produce maple syrup, so they typically aren’t fertilized or watered more than the rains give them so they don’t add any pollution, and it actively encourages people to leave their trees up, and often this spans entire forests since there’s also no real way of making industrial companies around real maple syrup and thusly nobody finds any need to cut down every single non-maple tree to make room for more maples because that just hurts the forest ecosystem that’s keeping the maples alive and thus makes more work for you and the max-20 other employees that deal with the actual making of the syrup.
Also for anyone not from Canada or the northeastern USA, you’re probably having flavored corn syrup. It’s super viscous, more like honey than water. That’s not real and that tastes nothing like the real thing. If you ever get a chance, try some real maple syrup. You won’t regret it! (Unless you’re apparently allergic to it. But I’ve never heard of anyone ever being allergic to maple syrup so it’s probably near-impossibly rare, and if you still are, please come and tell me I’d be incredibly curious how that goes)












