Anyone have birch running yet?

After that tremendous cold bit, under 20 at night for four weeks here, and now with freezing at night and daytime above freezing... I'm going to tap a test tree. Our trees always run sooner than I think they will, and I'm so hoping not to miss it this year.

What are you doing with the birch--using the sap as a syrup? We love xylitol in our dental routine, and that comes from the bark, I think. Or can it also be derived from the sap?

If this website can be believed,

https://www.soiladvocates.ca/maple-vs-birch-syrup/

birch syrup does contain small amounts of xylitol. More surprisingly it says that while maple syrup is sucrose, birch syrup is fructose! Which explains why so many people do not like it, that stuff is hard on the liver. There are also more bitter flavors when it is cooked. Apparently best practice at a large scale is to filter it with a kind of reverse osmosis to reduce the water content before heating. We just like to make a little syrup to go on ice cream. I am sad to learn it is fructose.

I just posted about this--I don't have birches to tap, but the maples are running 3-4 weeks early in our region (Western PA, USDA Zone 6, Alleghney Mountains).

Well I noticed the little flower caps had fallen, I think they are the covers for the pollen flowers, so I knew it was probably too late, but tapped the two trees we had planned to do this year and have not had sap. So I probably missed the first run, but birches will run sap three times, according to local experts, so hopefully we will get the other two.

Here in northern Minnesota, I just tapped four birch today. They're running, but I might be as much as a week late, so we'll see if I get enough to be worthwhile.

ETA 20230503: I'm getting just over a gallon per tree for the first day. Sap is clear and tasty. Last time I did this was my first time, two years ago, and I was using 1 gal pails instead of the 5-gal that I'm using now and I had to be careful to empty every day or waste, so this seems like about the same flow. Still, it's going to be hard to get much quantity, but I don't have my evaporator set up yet, so maybe that's a good thing.