I have to wonder. While camping, ive picked blueberries and boiled some for pancake syrup, yummy! Leftovers fermented quickly. Otoh, it wouldnt have kept well.
Similzrly with maple syrup. Im quite sure they did harvest it otl. Maybe getting enough withot irin kettles is too hard? You have to boil the sap down a LOT to get syrup.
North American Aboriginal cultures are fairly rare in not having developed an alcohol based beverage. Many of the cultures had the materials and Mesoamerican cultures had alcohol. So what if NA aboriginals had developed, let's say, maple wine/meadbased on maple syrup?
Maple Syrup works very well as either the base or as an adjunct to alcoholic beverages.
I have made both a maple mead and for a long time I have made a maple stout. Unfortunately with the cost of syrup $50.00 plus a gallon I have stopped.
I see know reason except that the indians boiled there sap down into sugar.
If you are doing a Vinland thread have some norseman put some maple sugar in the beer and go from there. Most home brewers try many adjuncts.
True; if you just use the sap without boiling it first the resulting liquor will be pretty weak stuff.
Of course you're talking harvesting sap from hundreds of trees for a few gallons of liquor; not exactly a high return on your investment of time and effort. And that would be my explanation of why it was not done; the natives can't really afford the investment of time and effort required for that small a return, not when it takes away from more important activities like hunting to provide enough food to make it through the winter.
It takes about five gallons of sap for each gallon of syrup. Here in Vermont they used to make sap beer at the end of the maple run. At that time the saps gets darker and thicker. You use it in place of water when making the beer. Just remember that distilling requires a bigger tech base than fermenting.
It sounds like you're aiming to make this product more than a historical curiosity. What direction are you angling for?
The initial reaction, I have to suppose, is that the NAs would be well used to alcohol and would not succumb so badly to the introduction of distilled spirits from Europe. OTOH, those spirits would still be far stronger than anything that could be produced in Native America.
There's some speculation that the Iroquois did, in fact, make alcohol from fermented maple sap... At least, according to some old books of Iroquois cultural practices that I've read.
I don't really think it would make a huge difference as far as Native American tolerance to European liquor goes. We know for fact that some North American groups, mostly in the Southwest, did have traditions of fermented beverages made from saguaro sap, agave nectar, cornmeal, and various fruits, yet alcoholism is still a major problem in Southwestern reservations. As Benkarnell suggested above, European distilled spirits were much more potent than anything the Native Americans could have conjured up.
The Mesoamericans to Oasesamerica had pulque,balche and tiswin. Black drink was common in Southeast with Mississippians through 1800's as well. So they did have fermented drinks but nothing really stronger and trade whiskey was notorious rotgut that was considered poison even back then. Let's face it, people from all races and lands have been looking for ways to get drunk all over the globe since the beginning.