Ant birch sap syrup

Birch syrup is produced from the sap of birch trees, which are well-known for an abundant amount of naturally occuring minerals, as a natural source of beneficial antioxidants and its wide usage for medical and cosmetic purposes.

Our birch syrup comes from the scenery woodland environment of Vidzeme, a historical part of Latvia, and the very heart of the largest and oldest nature reserve of the country – the town of Līgatne. Untouched wild nature of “the Middle Land”, climate, inovative technologies used and best production practices applied, create the magic that allows our product be, inherently, naturally organic.

Its production starts in early spring when winter loosens its grip and trees are tapped. Generally, collection of the sap starts in April and intensively lasts for only a few weeks with the time window being shorter than that for maples. It implies a time of hard and coordinated work of many people involved.

Some 100-200 litres of watery sap are needed on average to only produce a liter of authentic birch syrup, thus making naturally organic syrup a real treasure. This spring there was a limited amount of 140 000 liters of birch sap, drop by drop, collected by our team to produce and allow everyone to taste this unique product.

When collected, the sap is drawn to storage tanks, and then the sap is nanofiltered under high pressurethus taking out 90% of the water, compared to the initial amount, from the sap beforea boiling stage. This is done without diminishing the flavour and quality of the ultimate product - birch syrup. For further evaporation purpose we use natural firewood. During the process clouds of sweet scented steam raise in the air while the sap thickens gradually as the sugar caramelize and starts looking as a myriad of golden bubbles. It brings the evaporation process to an end with an extract of birch syrup that constitutes less than 1% of initially collected sap.

It is not, however, an end of work. The product still needs to be further fermented by the addition of wood ants with the process being all the time monitored and performed with due care and skills until birch syrup is hot-packed for retailing by end of August.