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I always thought it was a possibility because of the "refrigerate after opening" label, but it hasn't happened to me.

I keep it in the fridge and use within a year, my mom has one at her house which is only for me (yay mom) and gets used at the holidays when I'm home, she didn't have it in the fridge and it had an odd sour taste after a year so I got stuck using the fake.

My theory is, anything can mold/spoil if left alone long enough(except apparently honey). Hasn't happened to me yet, but goodness knows, I go through that stuff fast enough I think it'd have to be a REALLY aggressive strain.

thanks for doing the research em! who woulda thunk?

I have done the whole boiling and skimming thing once and it worked out just fine. I know it sounds really gross, but my general squeamishness was apparently overcome by my love of pancakes

note: the mold on my syrup was dark and on the top

I've never given it a chance. It disappears pretty soon after hitting the fridge.

I've had moldy maple syrup a few times, but never tried boiling and skimming. It was usually blue and white, floating on the top as little islands. If it happens again, I'll try boiling it!

To keep maple syrup even longer, the 100 percent pure stuff. Instead of putting into the fridge, put it in mason jars and then freeze it. It will keep longer, plus it doesn't freeze, it stays a liquid. At least that what my family does with our maple syrup.

Ha, once opened maple syrup would *never* last long enough in our house to get moldy! But interesting to know that UN-opened could last "indefinitely"... We have a decorative tin that we bought for aesthetic reasons and I just realized that we never opened it and actually used the syrup! Although it's been at least a couple years now...wonder if it's still good?

We make our own syrup and from time to time it gets moldy. Usually it's enough to just skim it off but sometimes the taste of the syrup is altered. My dad can't taste the difference so he gets to finish the "special" bottles.

we make our own maple syrup and have found that we don't have any mold problems if we let the specific gravity of the syrup reach the right point - to where there is very little or no water remaining (like honey - honey never molds in beehives because the bees remove almost all of the water content). to prevent mold from store-bought syrup, keep it in the refrigerator after opening. to get rid of mold, skim it off the top and gently heat in a saucepan, then eat.

I'm not quite sure whether this was an issue of the syrup going bad or being contaminated 'in situ' but a few months ago I went to use some pure first-run syrup (purchased by the gallon a few seasons ago) and found that it was black. Like, Black Gold, Texas Tea black. And it smelled like a smelting furnace. My hypothesis was that the steel jug had rusted/oxidized/whatever and contaminated the syrup either with tiny mold spores (enough to make light amber syrup look like Guinness) or the color was due to the rust itself. In either case I had to dump about a quart of expensive syrup down the drain...

This is so interesting! I also had no idea that maple syrup could go bad.

Didn't you all open up your moldy syrup and exclaim, "What handsome fungus!"

I had some get moldy a few weeks ago and found this article interesting from the Cornell Mushroom Blog:
http://blog.mycology.cornell.edu/?p=184

I'm sorry, but whose maple syrup stays in the fridge for a year? Mine certainly doesn't.

We were house-sitting for a man last year who had an ages-old half-used jug of maple syrup in his cupboard. I'd been hoping to use it for a cake I was planning to make, but it was of course moldy beyond belief. I stuck it in his fridge, because I'd read that you could boil it & skim the mold, but wasn't interested in undertaking the process myself. He probably hasn't touched it yet, either--even to open it.

Gosh yes, I've always found I should try and eat it within 6 weeks of opening before it goes moldy. It's even gone mouldy in the fridge for me.

ANY food will go mouldy if a contaminant gets in there - and once you've opened it and let some air into the bottle then you've got a potential contaminant stiuation as you never know what kind of spores are floating about in your air - so once opened its best to finish off food as soon as is practical

We've never had moldy maple syrup, but then again, we usually finish a can in 2 months tops. (my husband makes amazing pancakes)

I have heard the same advice from stilltasty.com. Also, I was in Vermont last month, and the little farm where we bought our syrup (Mom and Pops...yum), told us the same thing about mold. "Mom" said that if it begins to mold, just bring it to a boil and scrape off the mold, and you're good to go!

However, when you have syrup as good as theirs, I don't know how you can make it last longer than a year!!

Yeah, that person's syrup must have been seriously old...Maybe they should buy much smaller bottles of it, if they're not going to use it up so slowly.

I've had maple syrup get moldy. I did keep it in the fridge, but it was in the door (a warmer spot), and may have spent some time open on the pantry shelf before that. It was probably long past it's usable life anyhow.

This happened to me Friday morning (the morning after Thanksgiving) except the mold was a dark green. Until then I had no idea this could happen. I wish this post came out last week. It could have saved my pancakes!

Definitely just boil and skim and you're good - be careful to boil it in a pot with tall sides though, and keep an eye on it. Maple syrup bubbles up really high when heated and can boil over if you're not careful. Scrapping the burnt stuff off your stove = much less fun than eating pancakes.

Honey, I believe, is the one food that doesn't spoil. The sugar acid content keep bacteria from forming. Maple syrup must not be acidic enough.

Different jams will mold over at different rates. I noticed just a few weeks after opening a small jar of strawberry jam that it had mold starting to grow. I cleaned it out and put the jar in the fridge and it hasn't had a problem since -- although I always think about it when I put it on my bread! Good thing it is a small jar and will be gone soon. >.<

We keep honey in the pantry; always have. But that's interesting to know about maple syrup (the freezing part, that is). We keep ours in the fridge and use it up well within a year. Not sure why you would even have maple syrup if you were not going to go through a bottle in less than a year. ;)

I've had mold grow in my syrup before, though I didn't know it could be boiled off. Didn't know about the freezer trick, either!

I've never seen mold, but I've had maple syrup develop kind of a gauzy web within the syrup, not on top (visible in the glass jar) when I stored it in the cupboard. It creeped me out so I threw it away (so expensive!) and now keep it in the fridge. Freezer is a great tip.

Syrups, including honey, are hydrophilic from the high sugar content. This is why they generally don't spoil, since they suck the water right out of the mold or bacteria that tries to grow on them. But, that also means that they collect water from humid air. I did manage to get mold on good honey once, an older jar stuck in the back of a cupboard in a humid climate. There was sort of a puddle of watery honey on top, with the mold confined to the puddle.