Maple syrup day...or two.

Today is maple day. The day that we boil down the maple sap into syrup. Over the 15 years that my family has owned and managed this land,  my dad has selectively thinned out the trees surrounding the house but has had the foresight to leave the sugar maples. Now we have a good little sugarbush (group of sugar maples) covering a slope in front of the house. We have big plans to take advantage of all the trees, eventually building a sugar shack specifically for the purpose of boiling sap. This year, however, we are attempting a small scale operation.

In early March we tapped eight trees close to the driveway and set up a system of tubing that allows two trees to drain sap into one bucket. The tubing fits snuggly onto the tap and through a hole in the lid of the bucket, keeping debris and rainwater out of the collected sap.

A couple of the trees we tapped.

The collection system.

We simply empty the collection buckets into 5 gallon plastic jugs that I have burried in the driveway snowbank to keep cold until boiling time. Fresh maple sap contains about 2% sugar. It is delightful to take a sip of the cold slightly sweet sap while collecting. Jessie particularly likes this activity and will drink directly out of the large unwieldly buckets. Like any sugary solution, if allowed to warm and sit, sap will ferment and ruin the harvest. I read about saving sap in snow banks and thought it was worth a try. It seems to have worked so far -- the stored sap remained a slushy, half frozen mixture. However, the snow banks are melting, so my storage of sap has come to an end. It is time to boil.

Our rapidly melting snowbank storage system.

Maple syrup has a 66% sugar content. The process of making maple syrup consists of boiling the sap down until enough water has evaporated to concentrate the sugar content to 66%. I read that 48 gallons of sap will boil down to 1 gallon of syrup. That is a lot of evaporation and a lot of steam produced. Maple syrup is traditionally boiled outside on open fires for good reason as sugary condensation can coat walls and ceilings if boiled indoors. Today sugar shacks have wood or propane powered evaporators with proper ventilation.

I went against my better judgement and boiled sap in our basement on our large wood stove. The main reason for this decision is simply convenience. Setting up a cooking rack and managing an outdoor fire seemed like a lot of effort when we have an easy to manage wood stove. Our basement has windows and large swinging barn doors which I opened to circulate air and, to my delight, prevented most condensation. I was a little worried because I have seedlings growing in the basement and I didn't want to chill them. I cracked the barn door and opened a window for cross ventilation adjusting the flow depending on the odor of syrup in the room.

The initial setup -- fan to help move condensation and encourage evaporation.

Early on -- see it's still pretty clear.

Doors cracked to move the air.

It took 36 hours to boil our 30 gallons sap. Yep, thats right. I got up every two hours throughout the night to keep things moving. Initially, it took a good 4-5 hours before we could obtain a rolling boil. After that, it was a matter of keeping the wood stove stoked and adding sap as the pots boiled down. By the end of day two, the gallons of syrup had boiled down to fit into one large pot which I brought upstairs to finish on the gas stove with better temperature control.

Almost 30 gallons of sap now contained in one pot.

You can tell when the syrup is ready when the temperature of syrup boils 7.5 degrees fahrenheit above the temperature of boiling water. I found this was not an exact science as the temperature of both the boiling water and the sap varied depending on where in the pot the temperature was measured. Instead, we watched for the bubbles to turn to a fizzy consistency and for the last drop poured off a spoon to hang on like syrup -- also not an exact science, but that was what we did. To finish off the syrup, we filtered it through cheese cloth to remove the sugar sand and poured it into canning jars. Turns out, properly cooked syrup doesn't freeze, so you can store it in the freezer almost indefinitely. If it does freeze, it needs to be cooked more.

Much fizzier than the above -- we're almost there!

Filtering through a milk filter and cheesecloth -- we later modified the system to make it more efficient.

In the future, it would be nice to shorten boiling time (do I see an evaporator in our future?) and perhaps invest in a hygrometer, a device used to measure the moisture content in substances, to make finishing the syrup less of a guessing game. That being said, I enjoyed our experiment in small scale syrup making, and I'm looking forward to a larger, more efficient system.

The black jugs held the sap -- the jars hold the syrup.

More than 24 hours later, there is still a very hot, active bed of coals.