Quebec produced enough syrup this spring to fill approximately 287 million 6-ounce bottles. (Photo: Ano Lobb/CC BY 2.0)
Pancake-lovers, tuck in your napkins: the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers just announced a banner year for syrup. 148.2 million pounds of the stuff poured out of the province's trees this year—a 23% increase over the previous record, the Montreal Gazette reports.
Your average Québécois syruping season lasts from 20 to 25 days. But as Newswire CA explains, thanks to a spring that alternated between freezing and thawing, this year gave us eight good weeks of tree-tapping. "We've never seen a harvest of this magnitude," Federation president Serge Beaulieu told the outlet. "At times the flow [of maple water] was so strong it was hard to keep up with the boiling."
This year's boom is welcome news for the Federation, which has been trying to stave off both international competition and internal strife while still reeling from 2013's massive syrup heist. That theft saw $18 million worth of syrup stolen, a third of it never to be recovered.
As the Federation helpfully points out, this year's syrup haul would fill 24 Olympic swimming pools. More likely, it will end up in one of Quebec's main syrup export destinations: the U.S., Japan, France, and Germany. Leftovers, if there are any, will get poured into the province's Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve, to await their future deployment on waffles across the globe.
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