By Insia Lacewalla Published: Jul 31, 2026 12:30 PM IST 7 min read
Before the first light reaches the forest floor, the kithul tapper is already climbing. His bamboo ladder leans against a fishtail palm that rises 40 feet above the wet earth of Ambegoda, in southern Sri Lanka . The air at this hour is cool and close, thick with the smell of damp leaf litter. At the top tree, in the blue-grey sky before dawn, he binds the tree’s flower stalk with vine, makes a precise cut with a knife his father once carried, and sets a clay pot to catch what follows: a thin, milk-white sap that will begin its slow drip toward something extraordinary.
By the time the sun is ready to set, he will climb again. This is the rhythm of kithul madeema (kithul tapping)—a practice that has structured daily life in Sri Lanka’s forested interior for almost 2000 years. The sap drawn from Caryota urens, the indigenous fishtail palm, is intensely perishable. Left alone for a few hours in the heat, it ferments into kithul toddy, a potent drink with its own devoted following. As soon as the sap has been collected, the women of the household filter the liquid, set it to boil and tend a wood fire for hours to make treacle, a caramel-dark syrup. Depending on the age of the flower, the season, and the wood beneath the pot, the treacle can arrive at the table tasting of dark smoke and molasses, or pale gold and fruity as overripe jackfruit, with every gradation in between. Boiled further and poured into molds made from coconut shells, it sets into hakuru, a soft, mineral-rich jaggery that dissolves on the tongue.
The Fishtail Palm grows wild in the island’s wet forests and hill-country gardens. It takes 12-15 years to reach tapping maturity, and the work of harvesting its sap is demanding enough to give a younger generation, already weighing easier options, every reason to walk away. A tapper scales the tree twice a day. Once tapped, a single flower stalk can yield sap for 8-10 months, producing 20-30 bottles a day when the tree is generous. Yet, of the estimated half million tappable palms, fewer than half are tapped today. Last December, UNESCO added the craft to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, a recognition of its depth that arrived, with some irony, just as the profession edges toward vanishing.
What stands to be lost is not simply a sweetener. Kithul treacle and jaggery sit at the centre of Sri Lankan ceremonial life, present at festivals, offered to guests, and folded into Ayurvedic remedies for everything from poor digestion to anaemia. The sap carries compounds researchers describe as antidiabetic and antioxidant, and a glycaemic index well below that of refined cane—no small thing in a country where diabetes runs high. For centuries, before cane sugar arrived with colonisation, this was one of the island’s only sources of sweetness.
In Colombo’s kitchens, a handful of chefs have been working with kithul treacle. At the Sheraton Colombo, executive chef Ramesh Kularatnam treats kithul treacle less as a sugar and more as a complex liquid ingredient that is woody, and faintly smoky. “Its free amino acids let it behave like a savoury seasoning with a rare ability to cut through fierce black pepper or bitterness while still complementing it,” says chef Kularatnam. There is also, he points out, a simple test for the real thing. “Fake treacle hits you with an immediate, piercing cane-sugar sweetness but pure kithul arrives gently, layered with earthy, wood-aged undertones that build as it settles on your palate.”
Down the coast near Galle, the conversation turns from chemistry to memory. At Aditya Resort, director Shamindra Fernando showcases the pairing every Sri Lankan child knows: thick buffalo curd, tangy and faintly sour, served in a small clay pot with a thread of dark treacle drawn across the top. A short drive away, inside the Galle Fort Hotel, Island Life’s Amrit Rajaratnam pushes in the other direction. “At Ropewalk , our arrack-led bar, kithul is used in multiple forms. Our signature cocktail—Only Nabeel Likes This—is a curated mixture of fresh banana, pineapple, coconut cream, masala tea, kithul treacle, and Rockland White Rum. The kithul is highlighted as a core flavour that brings a smoky depth to it, which beautifully complements the tropical and spice notes. It also turns up glazing cubes of pork, through a salted watalappam, and even standing in for maple in a “treacle bacon”, darker and more brooding than the original. The treacle’s smoke holds its own savoury weight rather than dissolving into mere sweetness,” he says.
The very thing that makes kithul special is what puts it at risk. Good treacle has long been thinned with cane sugar by middlemen chasing volume, a practice that flattens both the flavour and the health properties that make the real thing worth seeking out. The clearest defence is to buy directly, at fair prices, from the people who make it, a choice that doubles as an argument for the tappers’ future.
In Ratnapura, the heartland of kithul, Lahiru Dilshan has been building that argument into a business. He grew up among the trees and began bottling treacle in 2018 after learning the process formally. This year, he opened the Only Kithul lounge , a place where refined sugar is banned outright. Here, staff sweeten their tea with jaggery, and the menu runs from kithul-treacle lattes to kithul-flour falafel. Every bottle leaves with a batch number traceable to the farm it came from.
Others are thinking bigger still. Champika Vincent, founded Raala Kithul to drag a fragile craft into modern logistics. The sap is collected on the Sinharaja fringe, chilled and moved by cold chain from collection centres in Neluwa to a facility at Veyangoda, with guaranteed prices and training for the farmers who supply it. His ambition is unembarrassed: that kithul might one day stand for Sri Lanka the way maple syrup stands for Canada.
And yet the people who can actually fill the pot are running out. On the remote Kosgolla Estate , where some of the island’s most prized jaggery is boiled from trees grown tall enough to break the rainforest canopy, Dilshan and his family highlight the tappers and tell their stories. “These are young men whose ability to read a tree and move through dense jungle has been learned in childhood. We are in the last generation of tappers who have the knowledge to climb and tap these trees,” he says, “it’s an art that may soon die.”
Trace any of it backwards—the thread of treacle drawn over a clay pot of curd, the glaze darkening on pork in a Galle kitchen, the latte poured at a Ratnapura counter—and you arrive at the same place: a man on a 40 feet ladder at dawn, reading a tree the way his father taught him. That is the real distance kithul travels, two millenia of it folded into a single bottle of dark syrup. The kitchens have only begun to understand what they have been handed. What remains to be seen is whether enough hands stay in the forest to keep filling the pot.
Ratnapura is the production heartland. At the Only Kithul lounge, treacle and jaggery sweeten everything from lattes to falafel, and plantation tours are planned. In Galle, Aditya Resort serves the classic pairing of buffalo curd and treacle, while Ropewalk inside the Galle Fort Hotel takes a modern turn with kithul-glazed pork and salted watalappam. Kithulgala, the town named for the palm, has roadside vendors selling treacle and jaggery with the surrounding forest showing the tree in its element. Near Galle, guided village walks in Kanneliya take in treacle-making and toddy tasting with kithul families. In Kandy, Aarunya Nature Resort offers tapping demonstrations that follow the sap from stalk to pot.
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