More than most want to know...
For most people who have never tried real maple syrup I?d recommend Grade A medium amber. Most imitation syrups try to imitate Grade A medium. Grade A dark has a bit more flavor and when held up to the light is well, translucent but darker. Grade B tastes really, really maple?y?too much so, to my sensitive tastes and is so dark it becomes essentially opaque.
Grade A Light Amber, (and though the link for quality grading doesn?t really say it, at least when I purchased a set of four ?test bottles? in New Hampshire (1972) the fourth bottle was for ?grade A ?fancy? light amber.? In my opinion this is the best. It?s delicate and perfect for anything, but, that?s just me. Usually nowadays one does not even find Grade A ?Fancy? light amber, and some will tell you that it does not exist, but it does. You can find it in Vermont or NH, or MA from small producers, though you might have to ?order? it and it can cost double or triple Grade A ?medium amber.? (It was the ?fourth? test bottle? in the grading kit?anything darker was Grade B or commercial. Often less than 2 or 3% of the entire crop is Grade A ?fancy? light amber. Often less than a few percent more is Grade A light amber. I imagine many producers just blend and do not attempt to produce a true ?fancy? light amber.
When the season warms up the sap rises in the tree to the buds; as long as it stays there, the rising sap is light colored. When a cold night occurs and the buds would freeze, the sap ?runs? to the roots, to return on the next sunny, warm day. As this cycle repeats the sap gets stronger tasting and will produce darker syrup.
Ideally, buy four small bottles or five (for fancy?if you can find some) but you won?t likely find ?fancy? grade A light amber unless you are buying it directly from a small producer.
Coombs Farm is an offshoot (I believe) of Bascom Farms in Acworth, New Hampshire, just up the hill from where I tapped my own trees. One year I assisted Bascom running food grade polyethylene lines from taps in the maple trees.
Back in the very early ?70?s Bascom was a small family farm. I?d guess that they produced several thousand gallons of syrup a year which was ?a big producer?. Over the years Bruce (or maybe I knew his dad?I?m not sure) expanded and started buying sap and syrup from other producers including many from Canada. Bascom via Coombs Family farms now sells about ¼ million gallons of syrup annually.
I think that the use of ?organic? is probably hype. The tree is simply drilled with a hole about ½? x 2? deep and plugged with a tap, usually connected to a poly line, which connects to a bigger line and so on flowing into a 1-5,000 gallon + tank, which is ?sucked dry? on a daily basis and then evaporated. (Nowadays often using osmosis and then vacuum and/or heat evaparation. Since it takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, any preservative would become 40x greater, unless it too evaporated. I do not think that any preservatives are ever used now, though long ago ("30+yrs) there was a time when some was used in the tap hole (a small pellet of something) ?to keep the tap? running, but I don?t think it ever worked anyway.
Preservatives are never used in maple syrup. Keep it in the fridge for it will mold over time. It can be frozen in a freezer but crystals of pure sugar will freeze out and make the resulting syrup even darker; though if you warm it up in a bucket of hot water it will revert to its normal state.
To my knowledge there is no difference in Canadian originated syrup, or Vermont, or NH or MA. The US dollar has dropped about 28% against the Canadian dollar over the past several months. If this continues or if the parity stays at this rate, next year Maple Syrup will likely rise by about 28% since so much comes from Canada. Enjoy, there is nothing like the real thing.