drying hard maple

[Jason]

Something dawned on me as i was reading some posts on dehumidifiers and kiln drying. If you dry hard maple and are able to catch the moisture from it, like a dehumidifier does, could you boil the fluid down to make maple syrup.
This is one of many of lifes questions that keep me up late at night. ???

[beenthere]

The dehumidifier will give you distiller water, not sap.

[GeneWengert-WoodDoc]

Evaporating water from wood is like evaporating salt water from a dish...the water leaves but the salt stays in the dish.  So, the sugars stay in the wood.  In fact, if drying is warm enough, they can turn darker in color.

[SwampDonkey]

I'm wondering about the volatile oils. They will boil off with the water if you boil sap. In yellow or black birch there is a wintergreen taste, when the sap is boiled this is gone.

[Ianab]

Yeah, but that's usually the acidic tannins that then corrode your dehumidifier. So while the condensation may not be 100% pure water, it's more like acid rain than maple syrup....

[SwampDonkey]

I wasn't suggesting it was anything near being maple syrup. But, just think if one consumed the stuff off a yellow/black birch boil. After all one of the ingredients in Blue Creeper is the same molecule(s) as in wintergreen. Yet, we eat wintergreen berries. Not all volatiles are toxic. I doubt though that the volatiles could be captured in a kiln process. I doubt it would condense with the water into a pan. It would have to be a closed system because of the different molecular weights and boil temps. ;)

[Den Socling]

A vacuum kiln is a closed system. Some of our customers dry thousands and thousands of hard maple baseball bats. So I wanted to know if the water with VOC's could be used. I sent a sample to SUNY. It turns out that there is a little sugar in the condensate but it would take far too much energy to get it out.

[SwampDonkey]

Certainly makes sense. ;)