The Sap from Birch Trees can be used in all sorts of ways. The most common are for drinking in tea, wine making and cooking. We fed our house plants with them too...

Tapping the Birch
We used two different methods of collecting the sap. The first was to make a 45 degree angle incision in the bark with a sterilised chisel (we used tea tree oil as it seemed apt). We could have used any sharp knife as long as it was clean as we didn't want to be infecting trees with any fungal diseases. The incision was opened up and a small stick was pushed into the gap. Sharpening the points slightly helps the sap run down the stick and into a container, for this we used a jam jar. Liam is a bit more organised and he fed his sap into a fermenting jar via a food grade rubber pipe. This stops flies getting into the liquid and keeps thing clean.
The second method was inspired by Liam's idea but we substituted the rubber hose for a drinking straw. I drilled a small hole into the bark just large enough for the straw to fit in snugly. Holding the jar in place on the trees wasn't a problem I have taken to stripping the leaves of all of our dead cordylines down into fibrous strands. They are remarkably strong and tied together make and ideal string substitute.

The sap is used for wine but can also be drunk fresh from the tree, made into tea, used for cooking and boiled down to make something similar to maple syrup, although I think you would need a lot of liquid to do that.
Liam managed to collect about 1-1.5 gallons of liquid from each tree. We weren't quite as productive. Two hours later we found that after about half a jar the liquid had stopped flowing. This might be because we left it too late in the season to tap into the sap. In late March the sap begins to rise into the tree and the last thing the tree wants is to lose any of it.
The liquid tasted of "tree" but we managed a drink, carefully sipping through the floating dead flies that were swimming around in the jar. Yum Yum.

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