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I'm in Eastern Ontario and have been doing this for 4 years. Our sap just really started running today so I was thinking it might be interesting to document the season, it usually lasts 2-4 weeks. I've got 32 buckets out this year with a barrel evaporator. Hopefully, we will be able to get a good boil going this weekend if the sap keeps running. What is maple syrup? It's a ton of maple sap (98% water, 2% sugar) boiled or otherwise concentrated down to about 66% sugar. Not actually a ton but about 40 gallons of sap will make 1 gallon of syrup. The exact sugar percentage of sap can vary from 1 to 5% but 2% is pretty typical and that's what we use for the 40:1 ratio. Nice. Where do I get all this sap? Stab maple trees, harvest their tears. Specifically, sugar maples in the spring when daytime temps are above zero and nights are below. Other maples will give you sap but it won't have nearly as much sugar in it. If you're not boiling sap right away, you need to keep it cool. It spoils at about the same rate as milk so I keep mine in a barrel dug into a big snowbank. When that melts, you can make it last a few days with ice packs inside but it's definitely better to just boil it especially later in the season. Buckets You drill a hole in the tree, hammer a spile in there and attach a bucket. You can use a clean milk jug instead or anything that's food grade-ish. Collect the sap in a bigger bucket every day or two. You can usually buy buckets, spiles and filters at hardware stores in maple regions.  I like the health (blue?) spiles. They're 5/16th instead of 7/16ths, it seems like the holes heal up a lot better and they get just as much sap.  Try to tap healthy trees that are wider than 12". No scrubs.  Lines Drill a hole in the tree, hammer a spile, attach a tube. Do a few more. Attach those tubes to a bigger tube. Let gravity or a vacuum move it all into a bigger bucket or your fancy sugar shack. I don't know much about this method but I hear it's great if you have thousands of taps. For the hobbyist, sometimes it's convenient to tube 3-4 close trees or one huge tree with 3-4 spiles into one big bucket rather than a small one hanging off each spile. How do I get rid of the 39 gallons of water?  By far the most common way is to light a fire and boil some water off. Add more sap. Repeat for hours and hours and hours as the sugar percentage gradually climbs.Propane You just put a pot or buffet pan on a turkey fryer/double fryer. I did this for the first two years. It wasn't bad with 6 taps but, in retrospect, it sucks. It's slow and expensive and not nearly as much fun.  Open flame You can just build a fire in a pit and suspend your pan over it. This will get it boiling but isn't very efficient and there's a good chance your syrup will absorb some smokey flavor which isn't as good as it sounds.  Cinderblock arch Make a rectangle of bricks. Put your pan on top and fire inside. Cinderblocks have a habit of cracking and crumbling with enough heat. It's tough to get the chimney draft right so you have the smoke risk again too.  Barrel or oil tank arch  That's my barrel. It's not the prettiest evaporator or the most efficient but it works alright. Total cost is about $100. $20 for the barrel, $20 each for the pans, $20 for the chimney and misc hardware and maybe $20-40 for firebricks to line the inside depending how efficient you want. It takes a few hours to make with a sawzall and drill. Mine can boil off about 4 gallons per hour for a gallon of syrup every 10 hours boiling. Apatite has a nicer 3 pan design but it takes a bit of welding. An oil tank is pretty similar but lets you use a bigger pan. You can add on a preheater, blower fan, float valve, stove rope and/or legs, they can be pretty nice.  Fancy money bags store bought evaporator  Like every other hobby, you can easily spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment. Fortunately, it scales pretty well so a beginner with a couple of maples in their backyard can easily make a few liters for friends and family. Alright, I boiled it for a while, now what? Syrup is done when it's 66.9% sugar. That's annoying to test though so most people just boil it to 219-220 degrees fahrenheit (use a candy thermometer). When you get to 215-217ish, you can take it off, put it in a smaller pot and finish it slowly on a bbq side burner or something like that. Don't burn it. Don't finish it off inside, the sugar steam will stick to everything. I use a spoon to test if it sheets off. A $20 brix tester works well too. When it's ready, I put a prefilter inside a presteamed wool filter, pour it through into a big bowl and then quickly  Resources http://mapletrader.com/community/ - Forum with lots of information from small hobbyists to huge producers. Regional threads will give you a pretty good idea of how far along your season is. http://en.cdlinc.ca/atkinson-maple.aspx - I usually get my stuff from this guy in Ontario although it's probably too late to get it delivered in time. http://www.wfmasonwelding.com/evaporators.html - Cheap-ish pre-built evaporators https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe1MCaam3OI - How sap works and the commercial technology
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Mar 7, 2016 23:51
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We collected the sap We boiled the sap  We eat the sap   Collected about 50 gallons last week and it came out to a perfect 5L of nice amber syrup. This year has been abysmal for sap production with the lack of good freeze/thaw days. It might start up again next week, I'd like to get another 8 liters at least.
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Mar 15, 2016 16:31
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This is really great info! A local park near me is starting a program for next year where they do a quick class on tapping trees and then let you put in a couple of spiles and collect in the spring. If you were just one person, who only wanted say a gallon for the year how many trees would you have to tap? You mentioned 40 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup approximately how many trees would that be? Also how would you grade the flavor? Obviously WAY better than that cheap log cabin poo poo, but is it noticeably better even then the real store bought maple syrup?
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Mar 16, 2016 03:46
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BaseballPCHiker posted:This is really great info! A local park near me is starting a program for next year where they do a quick class on tapping trees and then let you put in a couple of spiles and collect in the spring. If you were just one person, who only wanted say a gallon for the year how many trees would you have to tap? You mentioned 40 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup approximately how many trees would that be? That program sounds fun! They say a tree should be good for 10-20 gallons of sap a year which would give a 1-2 quarts of syrup. Theoretically, 4 taps would be enough to give you the 1 gallon of syrup but that means you'd have to store the sap all season from start to finish and then boil at the end. Bacteria grows really well in this stuff so the question is: do you have room to store up to 40 gallons of milk for a few weeks? If it's an off year, you may not even get the 40 gallons too (I've got ~1.8 gallons per tree so far this year). More taps is always better because it's easy to dump sap you can't use. I started with 6 in a really good year and we had fun with it. This batch turned out really well and I have no idea why! It seemed really clean. Usually when you boil, you get a scum on top that you have to take off with a strainer every few hours but this stuff only required it a couple of times the entire batch. Otherwise, it's pretty typical early season syrup. It's light and has a bit of vanilla flavor but is still very much maple syrup. Most store bought stuff is blended a bit darker. Later in the season, syrup gets darker and stronger and can get a bit of molasses flavor. Hipsters who want ultimate maple and my parents really like it, . It used to be sold as grade B but now is Grade A dark. Read more about that at http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/beware-grade-b-maple-syrup-trickery/. So the long answer is that homemade maple syrup isn't noticeably better than store bought (if it's produced in places like Quebec, Ontario or Vermont that have strict regulations on what can be sold as maple syrup) BUT you can make sure that what you get is pure early season if that's what you like. And it's better because I know I made it  We had a blind taste test last year with our early, late and storebought and were able to pick them out pretty easily but I wouldn't say that store bought is bad, it's just a bit boring.
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Mar 16, 2016 06:05
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YAY!!!!!! Keep up the good work  We took this year off but are going to be at it hard again next year.
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Mar 16, 2016 14:28
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I have several maple trees. But I can not tell them apart.   The foreground tree is a different species from those in back. Have you learned to tell which tree is what species? DreadLlama fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Mar 18, 2016 |
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Mar 18, 2016 00:15
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Wow, you could be my neighbour but we have a foot of snow. Lots of young ones in the first pic but you shouldn't tap them until they're 12" wide at chest height. That one in the foreground might be maple, I'd guess the back is basswood by the bark and clumping. Maple bark is generally not ridgy, it's flaky and the flakes seem to peel up at the top and bottom. Not super flaky like the hop hornbeam on the close left in the first picture though. I'm looking for nice mature trees like this:  The bark can be variable though and smoother and ridgier when they're younger. On those trees, I'll check the twigs. If the new branches are growing opposite, it's a good sign it's a maple (or an ash). Alternating and it's maybe an elm or oak. Around here anyways, ymmv. The best way to tell is to just drill a 5/16s hole in them on a warm sunny day after a cold night. If it starts leaking profusely, maple. I drilled a couple of oaks by accident my first year and still only went 31/32 this year (got tricked by an ash that looks just like your foreground tree). All the other trees were giving me a few liters a day and that one was bone dry so we figured it out. apatite posted:YAY!!!!!! You picked a great year to skip, I've only had a few drops of sap all week.
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Mar 18, 2016 00:48
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That looks awesome. I have fond memories of sugaring off as a little kid; my favourite was making tire ŕ l'érable (maple taffy? toffee? I don't know what the English word would be) which always seemed like magic to me. I live in the city and have no access to trees to tap now but this is my dream for the "someday" when I move back out to the country!
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Mar 18, 2016 03:17
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Ikantski posted:
That is what everyone is telling me. Everything is budding here... I suspect lots of folks are only making bulk grade syrup this year. For tree ID guy, advice above is spot on. I also fell victim to tapping one shagbark hickory or something my first two years. You'll get the hang of it It also helps if you can check the trees during the summer when you can get a definitive leaf ID
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Mar 18, 2016 20:43
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That's my plan. But there was some prickly ash between me and the trees.
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Mar 19, 2016 01:49
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Here is a tree that I found. It looks all piney down below. It does not look poplar or birch-like to me.  It is not clustered with other trees at the base as I see with basswoods (this thread is the 3rd disparate entity to identify afore-photographed trees). I am positively giddy at the prospect of having spotted a potential mature maple. What kind of tree do you think this is? This is a different tree. Based on earlier statements, I believe the foreground tree to be an immature sugar maple.  Did I get it right?
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Mar 20, 2016 05:17
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First tree looks like a sugar maple to me! Second is hop hornbeam/ironwood. Immature maples have pretty smooth bark.
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Mar 20, 2016 13:20
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Awesome thread. You don't tap any of the lesser maples or even black birch? I plan on trying this pretty soon, but just using hand carved taps, some cans with makeshift covers on them, and honestly boiling something forty times sounds ridiculous so I might just drink the sap or do a lazy 1-2x boil and see how much water that removes.
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Mar 20, 2016 18:18
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Today some people were doing a maple sugar thing. I took pictures.  This sign depicts how primitive Europeans used to evaporate their maple sap.  These people are doing stuff like on the sign:  Before they discovered metallurgy, Casino-Indians would evaporate their sap in hollowed out logs and/or stumps by tossing hot stones from a fire at them. They'd make a jug out of some wood and then fill it with sap and then put hot rocks in the jugs to boil the sap. Pretty clever for people who hadn't figured out copper by the 1600's.  This sign depicts contemporary technology:  Nowadays you run a vacuum to prevent the line from freezing. Vacuum keeps sap from stopping at a bow in the line for example. It it stops it'll freeze and then it won't unfreeze until noon probably. So vacuums are a thing now. Also, you can run your maple sap through an RO filter before you boil it. This concentrates it down from 2% to 10%. But you collect the concentrated sap from what would normally be considered the "brine" side of the RO unit. As a side effect, this means that pure drinking water is a byproduct of the maple sugar industry. This tree has been tapped and has a bucket.  This tree has been tapped with plastic tube.  This tree is not a sugar maple. It is a white ash. You can tell it is a white ash by the sign.  Here are some more trees that have signs near them:   
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Mar 21, 2016 05:39
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Those are great pics, thanks for sharing. I can't imagine how long this would take dropping hot rocks into the sapextra stout posted:Awesome thread. You don't tap any of the lesser maples or even black birch? I plan on trying this pretty soon, but just using hand carved taps, some cans with makeshift covers on them, and honestly boiling something forty times sounds ridiculous so I might just drink the sap or do a lazy 1-2x boil and see how much water that removes. I actually only have sugar maples. If I had Norway or Red maples, I'd tap them too. Birch seems a huge pain in the rear end and I wouldn't touch that stuff with 10 foot stainless pole, http://www.crookedchimneysyrup.com/?page_id=24 Chugging sap is good, it tastes a bit like maple gatorade to me. I braised a beef roast in sap for 3 hours this year too. Tasty but it didn't have much maple flavor.  This is what I've been dealing with for the past week. The sap finally dripped a few inches yesterday and then really turned on today, almost filling a bunch of my buckets. Probably got a solid 30 gallons. Weather looks perfect, definitely boiling this weekend.
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Mar 22, 2016 04:04
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Let's talk about evaporators. I'm trying to figure out how they work. First off, the easy part. Here's what a bottom bit looks like if it's a wood burner:   It's a big metal box that you put fire in. Even if you are not mechanically inclined yourself, it should be easy for you to imagine that someone who is so inclined could cobble something together out of scrap metal which would be functionally identical, albeit perhaps not as pretty. Such is my intention. The top half of a maple sugar evaporator is not so immediately intuitive.  I see two pans connected through a gate valve and a thermometer on the low side. Presumably sap is evaporated in stages. I've heard that sap needs "finishing" but I don't know quite what that means.
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Mar 25, 2016 17:31
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 That illustrates it pretty well. The pan is partitioned so sap comes in one end and syrup comes out the other. In the same pan, sap will be boiling at 212 on one side and 218 the other. Not required by any means, I manually transfer mine from pan to pan and lots of people just use one unpartitioned pan. Finishing means taking that almost done sap off the big evaporator and boiling the last bit on a more controllable heat source. It's extremely easy to overshoot on the big boiler. Postess with the Mostest fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Mar 25, 2016 |
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Mar 25, 2016 17:55
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DreadLlama posted:
The smaller part to the right in this image is a "syrup pan" -- stuff that is almost syrup will come from the back pan into this front pan to be finished, looks like that is what the thermometer and gate valve are for. You would in theory not need a separate "finishing" setup with this Smokey Lake setup you have pictured. In reality it seems a lot of people still draw off from the syrup pan a little early and then finish in another setup as it is more precise. You are correct that it will more or less be in stages but in this setup it would be like continuous flow. You'd put raw sap (ideally preheated) in at the back of the big pan and it would eventually come out the front of the small pan as syrup or very close to syrup. In this Smokey Lake setup you have pictured it actually looks like there is a float box on the right side of the large pan (looking from front or where the small pan is). This float valve would feed sap into the large pan and it would go out the transfer port on the left side into the syrup pan in front when appropriate temp is reached. There should then be a draw off port on the front of the syrup pan If you check this PDF there is a diagram that shows basically the exact pan setup you have posted and how the sap/syrup flows through on page 3 http://www.extension.iastate.edu/forestry/publications/pdf_files/f-337.pdf apatite fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Mar 25, 2016 |
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Mar 25, 2016 20:03
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That pdf is rich with useful information. Recommend A++ would read again.  The diagram shows sugar content as a percent, but the only instrument I see is a thermometer. Why is "7 1/4 degrees F above the boiling point of water" the ideal draw off temperature instead of some other temperature? Unless... Is the sap expected to be boiling the entire time it's in the evaporator? DreadLlama fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Mar 26, 2016 |
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Mar 26, 2016 02:34
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This tree is so big that I had to take three pictures to get it all.   This other tree is probably a silver maple.    Holy poo poo look at all these goddamned trees. 
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Mar 28, 2016 04:25
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That first tree would be a monster producer I bet, huge crown. We boiled about 30 gallons off today but no time to finish. Reduced it down to a 5 gallon pail, put it in a snow bank for next weekend. Tir and beer party.  The kids made some crazy ones. 
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Mar 28, 2016 05:23
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Ikantski posted:Those are great pics, thanks for sharing. I can't imagine how long this would take dropping hot rocks into the sap Thanks for the link, I didn't realize there was more work involved in black birch, I'm not too surprised though as the only guy I know who only goes for black birch primarily makes wine and not syrup. Boiling 100 gallons of something into 1 gallon of something sounds really painful.
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Mar 28, 2016 18:07
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extra stout posted:Boiling 100 gallons of something into 1 gallon of something sounds really painful. It just means drinking 10 gallons of beer while you're doing it
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Mar 28, 2016 21:48
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I'm preparing for the 2057 season and have seedlings scheduled to go in the ground early in May 2016. Need to water trees. If any of you collect via tube, what happens if you leave it out all summer?
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Apr 4, 2016 18:04
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DreadLlama posted:I'm preparing for the 2057 season and have seedlings scheduled to go in the ground early in May 2016. Need to water trees. Lots of people leave the tubing up all year, most of them wash it at the end of the collection season. Some of them have problems with deer tearing it down
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Apr 7, 2016 19:26
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Boiled and finished up another 9L of syrup. I need to figure out a better way to deal with ashes/coals, it gets tough to fit enough wood in after about 8 hours of boiling. A taller door would probably help. My 15 gallon barrel spoiled (cloudy and stinky sap), I should have had more ice in it for the week I guess. The 55 and sweet from last week was fine luckily. I'd like to get one more boil this year. My buckets have been sitting on the trees all week, full and frozen solid fuuuck this weather.   The big lads are 2L! 
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Apr 8, 2016 21:16
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Is that "55" as in "55 gallon drum?" How many hours of hauling buckets was it?
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Apr 9, 2016 05:16
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DreadLlama posted:Is that "55" as in "55 gallon drum?" How many hours of hauling buckets was it? Yep. Maybe 60 minutes of hauling buckets? I don't haul each one, I carry two 5 gallon pails and transfer to those and return to base when full. The furthest pail is only about 100 yards from the barrel. The hours definitely factor into the evaporating time, I can't boil that down in one day. 55 + 15 is about right for two days.
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Apr 9, 2016 13:46
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I like the idea of putting signs up near trees. I met some forest people and they agreed to mark sugar maples in exchange for something to do. Signs are expensive but orange spraypaint isn't so that's what we used.  We painted these on a couple dozen trees before we got bored of it. "Just wait until August and mark the ones that have maple leafs on them" they told me - was better than trying to tell if something's an elm or a maple when it hasn't got leaves on it.  So these three didn't get tagged. They are representative of what was standing in the latter part of the previous-to-last century. This land was divvied up by the Canadian government to pioneer settlers in the 1860s. This place was producing 200lbs of maple sugar per year as of the 1861 census. Not sap, not syrup, sugar. Unfortunately, most of those trees aren't here anymore. The guy who owned the land got too old and died and it changed hands a few times. Somewhere between 1861 and right now, some rear end in a top hat figured he'd get better money from hardwood lumber than he would from maple sap (immediately prior to sale, say the forest people), and cut down all the trees. The occupant who was here from 1940 to 1970 tried to use it for pasture - failed - and got the idea to plant some maple saplings - which is where we still stand today.    These should be ready for tapping circa 2057.
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Apr 24, 2016 04:15
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Nice of you to plant deer candy, I hope they're fenced off. Those are really nice sized trees, you should get tons next year. I finished my season last weekend with another 9L of late season syrup for a total of around 25L. It's darker but rich with no molasses or burnt taste, very good stuff. I half finished one pan while I was finishing in the other pan and just put it out for the bees, I think they're addicted.  Our best season yet and amazing considering the dismal start. See y'all next year.
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Apr 25, 2016 20:33
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Now I'm really curious as to what flavors the honey would pick up if you gave a hive of honeybees periodic infusions of half-condensed sap.
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Apr 25, 2016 21:57
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