Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
Maple syrup. With North America cooling off sugar maple will spread south.
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Maple, Birch, and a couple others are readily tapped for consumable saps. I personally don't care for Birch syrup... boiling it down smells like a locker room after players have just left for home... and it's flavor isn't as vanillin laden as Maple. But it goes OK on the pancakes.
Either can be fermented easily enough by not boiling down completely to syrup.
A quick search finds this...
https://www.americanforests.org/maga...-food-forests/
Maple, Birch, Walnut, Butternut, and Sycamore all supposedly can make decent syrups. If you can make syrup, you can thin syrup, and add yeast to ferment it.
I have tasted a maple & honey mead before. Tasty, as the maple brings vanillin and other flavors. Maple syrup makes a decent second sugar for meads.
Likewise, a bunch of different leaves can be crushed and boiled or crushed and soaked to extract the sugars and tannins... we generally call this tea...
Basically, adding hot water allows extracting the flavors and sugars... longer it's warm and wet, the more that's leached out. (Think Sun Tea... naturally sweeter than hot brewed... but it takes hours instead of minutes.)
Berries are easily crushed for juices, and grapes are a berry... not all are edible, but the inedible ones can be harvested for fuel-alcohols.
There are a number of fungi which are able to break down starches for yeast to consume; the best known is Koji (which works on rice), and sake is essentially fermented twice - once for the koji, then yeast is added to turn the released sugars to alcohols and CO2.