Maple Syruping 2021 Pt1

🍁Making Syrup From Sap🥞

This spring was our 4th year of tapping our Maple trees to make syrup. This post and my next one will walk you through what we did.

Several years ago we purchased several taps from a nearby nature center and have been using them since. We found about 30 usable maple trees and drilled a slightly angled hole above their largest root(preferably on the south side of the tree). This year sap started flowing out of the holes as soon as we drilled them, so we quickly pounded the taps in and hung an ice cream bucket from each. By the time we finished tapping all the trees, we had collected almost a full bucket(shown below). After just a few hours, the buckets were almost all full! The sap by itself tastes slightly sweet but by condensing the sugars, you end up with the sticky sweet liquid we all know and enjoy.

Can you find all 6 sap buckets in the picture below?

Several times a day, we collected sap from all the trees. We didn't worry about the small insects and dirt that ended up in the buckets because it would later get cooked and strained. We stored the sap in five-gallon buckets with lids, and piled snow around them.

Usually the sap only runs for a couple weeks but this year it ran for over a month! Once we had about 15 gallons of sap, we started cooking it to boil off the excess water. To contain the fire, we use an old clothes washer we hauled out of the woods(it used to be an old homestead so there’s all sorts of old trash) and set our pan on a grate above it. For the next few weeks, we almost continually stoked the fire(during the day) and ended up using 2-3 entire trees worth of firewood. We added sap whenever possible, but finished the syrup in three batches so as to not burn the sugar of the sap added first. Interestingly, each of the three batches tasted different. What we did with the syrup after this will be in my next post.