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Hi everyone I wasn't sure where to post this so Motronic suggested I do a new thread - no idea how active I'll be, but  right. The bad news is that I'm not a raw newbie so the pure maple syrup on its own might not produce any Grovertainment. The good news is that I have some related projects that might produce a little Grovertainment that I'll post about in the thread if/when they come up.For the third year running I'm making my own maple syrup from trees on and around my acreage in rural Western Canada. Now some of you arbophiles may be like "Western Canada, you fool, that's not where maple syrup comes from!" And you would be right, except oh so wrong. What I tap is the Manitoba Maple, aka the Boxelder tree. The classic Canadian Flag sugar maple produces sap that reduces to syrup at 40:1 ratio. The Manitoba Maple produces sap that's 2/3 as strong at a 60:1 ratio. Some day, I'll try tapping birches for a 80:1 ratio. if you've ever seen birch syrup that's more or less why it costs twice as much as maple or more. The thing is I prefer the flavour of the Manitoba Maple syrup to classic maple - it's simply stronger and sharper tasting, and I'm very much a fan of strong flavours. For the most part in my posting I'll probably just write "maple." My harvesting process is pretty simple: I drill a 5/16 hole into a tree, use a tiny ball peen hammer to tap a 5/16 food-grade steel tube into said hole, and put a short length of hose to run the sap to a 4l milk jug which I cleaned out. The eagle-eyed among you will notice that there are maybe some flaws wrt food safety in this system but I have basic rebuttals to those flaws which I see too: 1) It's for personal use and I don't sell it or anything. 2) Anything that comes out of these trees is going to be boiled for literal hours, filtered, boiled again to about 104C, and then hot canned in sterilized jars, so microbial growth is basically a non-issue. Last week I opened my last sealed jar and it was fine. 3) I can tell if something has properly gone bad and I'll throw it out if it does. 4) I sterilize the taps before they go into the trees to keep the trees from getting infections from the process. If I were selling the stuff I'd actually get my hands on as many ice cream pails as possible and do a different setup based on the work flow of a nonprofit near me that does a couple hundred trees to raise money for woodland preservation. As it stands my goal is to do this was much as I can with reused and reusable materials.   This is what I did today: I have 3 maple trunks on two roots close to my house mixed in among European Ash and Elm trees. We've had some temperatures teasing with freezing and thawing so I snowshoed out and did these ones so that I can monitor when the sap begins to flow. Once they start producing, they will put out about 500 to 1500 ml of sap per day, depending on conditions, which I manage by immediately starting the boiling process and swapping out jugs. At that time I'll go tap another 12 or so larger trees that are slightly farther from my house and more difficult to monitor. Those ones are also a bit more shaded so they tend to start later anyway. In year 1 I did two trunks and got about 600 ml of syrup. In year 2 I did about six trunks and got about 1l of syrup. The changes for this year are basically that I did a better job of scouting out and marking suitable trees and clearing good paths to them, and I'm looking for more energy- and attention-efficient ways of cooking the syrup down. I'm super happy to take suggestions for that cooking process. I'm thinking about buying and trying a rice cooker this year, because it looks to me like a rice cooker's temperature shutoff will be about 70% of the way through the boil process (judging from graphs about the boiling point of sugar solutions), so it can be relatively hands off and no disaster will happen if I fall asleep with syrup going. I'm not sure if there are good induction plates with auto-shutoffs. I'm also procrastinating on putting a wood stove into an out building, but if I finish that, I might do some of my cooking that way by burning scrap wood from the shop instead of in a big stock pot on my stove. So this thread might just be a journal of my maple adventures for 2023, but sometimes other people find these things interesting. e. corrected a typo that created a factual error. CommonShore fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 12, 2023 00:29
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I'm here for it, this sounds fascinating!
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Feb 12, 2023 14:34
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my cat is norris posted:I'm here for it, this sounds fascinating! Great! That makes me happy that I'm not just shouting into the void. And actually one thing that I should have added to the op: in the end my hope is that everyone watching this goes "drat, that poo poo looks easy and I have a sugar maple / silver maple / manitoba maple in my yard that's way bigger than the trees CS tapping ... I wonder ...."
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Feb 12, 2023 16:34
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I'm surprised you don't get overrun with sap to boil. My dad does the maples he has (mostly silver maples with two sugar) and by March he's spending days running the syrup boiler. For the first couple years he DIY'd a wood burning system where he had big shallow pans that sat over the fire to boil off. I'd try to avoid direct heat if you go that route as it was difficult to control. It was basically the version that you find where people put a fire under the pans that are on cinder blocks. That can scorch, especially when you're near the end of the boil. It always ends up a little thinner than the syrup you get at the store, but the flavor is so much more amazing. Only thing I'd recommend you change is hot water canning the syrup. Keeps the possibility of it going off before opening down to shelf stable for years. We've had some last for 3-4 years because it starts very hot and anything that might have gone in while packaging gets taken care of in the 10 minute boil in the canning process. It's such an easy and wonderful process. It does make me want to tap the paper birch in my yard.
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Feb 12, 2023 17:23
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Jhet posted:I'm surprised you don't get overrun with sap to boil. My dad does the maples he has (mostly silver maples with two sugar) and by March he's spending days running the syrup boiler. For the first couple years he DIY'd a wood burning system where he had big shallow pans that sat over the fire to boil off. I'd try to avoid direct heat if you go that route as it was difficult to control. It was basically the version that you find where people put a fire under the pans that are on cinder blocks. That can scorch, especially when you're near the end of the boil. It always ends up a little thinner than the syrup you get at the store, but the flavor is so much more amazing. Ah yeah I may have not been clear - when I do my final boil to syrup I hot pack and boil it as if it's jam and I've had no problems with spoilage so far. I do a lot of sap boiling, and my strategy for that is that it goes straight from the jugs to the cooker. I work from home so pretty much all day I have the stove going, but my SO this year is like "love the syrup don't stop doing the syrup but do you think we can find a way to get the gigantic steaming pot off the stove for the next month?" so I'm trying to find some solutions to that. If the rice cooker thing works I can put it in an outbuilding, press the button, and walk away. I'm also thinking about buying a propane burner (which I'll use for other stuff anyway) to do the initial 75% cook down, but that would need to be pretty supervised. My best idea was definitely too  to actually try: find an old-style tilt scale, wire it up so the tilt/trip mechanism would function as a switch that would turn off if the load was lighter than the settings, put a hot plate on there, and set it so that it would turn off after the load was x kgs lighter than where it started. Definitely not too dangerous.
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Feb 12, 2023 17:46
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CommonShore posted:Ah yeah I may have not been clear - when I do my final boil to syrup I hot pack and boil it as if it's jam and I've had no problems with spoilage so far. You might be better off doing it with a thermocouple with a temp probe that you can set to 101-102C and put in line with the hot plate. Also safer than a big tilt scale that is possibly over-engineering a solution. Inkbird makes some good cost efficient models if you can manage some wiring yourself. Induction burners do have auto shut offs, but they're set to much much hotter than you'd need. Propane for the evaporator is where my dad's set up has gone. Still can't completely leave it unsupervised, but you also don't need to just sit there.
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Feb 12, 2023 18:41
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Jhet posted:You might be better off doing it with a thermocouple with a temp probe that you can set to 101-102C and put in line with the hot plate. Also safer than a big tilt scale that is possibly over-engineering a solution. Inkbird makes some good cost efficient models if you can manage some wiring yourself. Induction burners do have auto shut offs, but they're set to much much hotter than you'd need. Propane for the evaporator is where my dad's set up has gone. Still can't completely leave it unsupervised, but you also don't need to just sit there. Yeah I'll likely pick up a propane burner this week. I have lots of propane anyway.
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Feb 12, 2023 18:51
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You might also be into cabbages and kings' thread -- he has a $$$$ maple setup. It's super interesting but I'm also here for this because it's much more doable. I think a slow cooker is a better plan because the capacity is so much larger. If you're willing to check before you go to bed, I think it would be fine on its own. If you want it super hands-off, I would get a smart probe thermometer, one of the ones recommended in the smoking thread. That will give you a temp graph and alerts on your phone and everything else. You could also get an inline temp controller of the kind they used to make for crockpot sous vide. I would still be in there pretty often because you're going to want to add more, make sure a mouse didn't fall in, etc. Anne Whateley fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Feb 12, 2023 |
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Feb 12, 2023 20:59
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i like nice words
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I wonder if you could use the same technique on birch trees for birch drink? I had some in Ukraine and liked it quite a bit, but I can't find it in the States with any regularity.
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Feb 13, 2023 01:48
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:I wonder if you could use the same technique on birch trees for birch drink? I had some in Ukraine and liked it quite a bit, but I can't find it in the States with any regularity. Yes it works just the same as I understand but you need to cook way longer and birch trees don't get as big so there's less per tree on average
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Feb 13, 2023 02:31
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CommonShore posted:What I tap is the Manitoba Maple, aka the Boxelder tree. The classic Canadian Flag sugar maple produces sap that reduces to syrup at 40:1 ratio. The Manitoba Maple produces sap that's 2/3 as strong at a 60:1 ratio. Some day, I'll try tapping birches for a 60:1 ratio. if you've ever seen birch syrup that's more or less why it costs twice as much as maple or more.
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Feb 13, 2023 03:32
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Cool, glad to see there's a maple syrup thread up this year. About the induction cookplates - we have two, one about 12 years old and the other from last year. Both have automatic shutoffs and turn off after an hour or two. You can still burn small amounts but it's a lot easier to deal with large pots - after a while you get a pretty good idea of when you're risking burning if you turn the plate on again and wander off to do other things. We're on Vancouver Island so we're tapping Western Big-Leafed maples. It's probably partly due to our mild winters and lack of sharp temperature swings between night and day but the trees are kind of unpredictable. We've had 14 taps out since November and by the time we pull them at the end of February we might get a whopping 2 litres of syrup this year. I'm sure it's costing us a lot in electricity but the flavour is worth it. Besides, it's a hobby. 
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Feb 13, 2023 06:22
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I bought a propane burner yesterday so I'll do small boils stovetop and big boils on the propane, outside. whoops! Birches are an 80:1 ratio! My mistake!
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Feb 15, 2023 19:51
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I am also independently chosen to try to make syrup this year. I've got a single red maple on my property of proper size, so maybe I'll get one pancake worth, but we'll see. Need the weather to cool down a bit to actually get some sap flowing. e: From my amateur research, it's the same process for other trees that have suitable sap. Birch, ash, etc. I Greyhound fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Feb 18, 2023 |
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Feb 18, 2023 04:31
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I Greyhound posted:I am also independently chosen to try to make syrup this year. I've got a single red maple on my property of proper size, so maybe I'll get one pancake worth, but we'll see. Need the weather to cool down a bit to actually get some sap flowing. How big is your maple? You might be able to put two taps into it. BTW my steel tubes are reusable steel straws that I cut up. Super cheap food grade pipes.
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Feb 18, 2023 05:39
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Update: Things froze really solid after my last post and they're just starting to warm up now. We have a few days this week that are forecast to get closer to freezing so the sap might begin to move soon depending on secondary factors
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Feb 28, 2023 00:39
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:I wonder if you could use the same technique on birch trees for birch drink? I had some in Ukraine and liked it quite a bit, but I can't find it in the States with any regularity.
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Feb 28, 2023 02:41
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Another update: still frozen solid. There have been a few days that have peeked above 0, but the accompanying nights have been too cold for the trees to get going. The sun is getting warm enough to bring snow to a melt even if the air is still below freezing, but the trees are too shaded to benefit much from that. I'm starting to worry that this will be a rapid thaw this year which is crummy for my syrup if good for my garden plans.
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Mar 6, 2023 17:50
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Oh just for reference it's -17 rn and was -22 overnight. The highest high in my current 10-day forecast is -3.
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Mar 6, 2023 17:52
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Why is a rapid thaw bad for syrup?
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Mar 6, 2023 20:06
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my cat is norris posted:Why is a rapid thaw bad for syrup? The sap runs when the trees freeze and thaw a lot and stops when the temperature stays high. Optimal conditions are a winter that leaves a ton of snow on the ground and then a period where it goes to 5-10 degrees below freezing every night, and then 5-10 above every day. The sap will freeze every night, and a bit more water will go into the groud and the sap will run every day. Once it starts getting to 15 degrees above freezing during the day, once the snow is gone, and once it stops getting cold enough at night to overcome the thermal mass of the trees and freeze things, the sap stops. If we get a rapid thaw that window will just be shorter and the taps will produce for fewer days and thus give less total sap.
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Mar 7, 2023 01:05
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 This is my second year doin' maple syrup. I kind of walked into the setup and am assisting / hauling / don't know poo poo / know enough to be dangerous. Like the OP this is for private family consumption, not being sold or given away, and we're also boiling the ever living poo poo out of it throughout the process. More commercial setup would get more obvious attention. Step one: get jugs out, rinse them and put them in the side by each:  Step two: drill into tree, hammer tap, put tube into jug:  Step three: through whatever number of whatever loving trees you jam this poo poo into:  Step sixteen: wait around and watch the weather, go kick jugs, decide to start collecting them, decide post holing through the snow for the first 30 gallons is stupid, for the next round of collection use snow shoes and dream of a lovely snowmobile with sled for more efficient collection:  Step eighteen: start burning wood in your boil contraption and add sap jugs:  Note tube in front is where you insert a hair dryer to add more air to get 'er friggin' rippin bud. Step twenty through fifty, break out the patio set and monitor the boil monitor both levels of liquid going in and boiling out:  Step addendum 69.420 we're a few beers in, make sure the stove is choochin':  Try to avoid too much chooch and drunkenly burning down your out building. Step ??? Hydrometer monitor boil test look wait around oh gently caress don't burn it:  This has been a handy guide to helping a family with their already established syrup boil process. The two boils we've done have been 30 and 40 gallons respectively, I don't know how how to convert that to maple units because the public school system gently caress'd me bro sorry. Future improvements may involve a lovely snowmobile to reach more trees, not letting the buckets you hid in a snow bank freeze solid so you spend extra hours thawing them out, a fill pan up top with copper tubing around the stove pipe to pre heat into the actual boil pan. Future improvements will realistically be just a lovely snowmobile and a pair of pit vipers, maybe a Canadian tuxedo.
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Mar 8, 2023 17:16
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i think that converts over to 12 stone of syrup
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Mar 8, 2023 17:33
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Rad I'm glad you're here to take the pressure off of my content lol - are those Silver Maples? What general region are you in? How many taps are you doing?
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Mar 8, 2023 17:39
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CommonShore posted:Rad I'm glad you're here to take the pressure off of my content lol - Tree  CommonShore posted:What general region are you in? New England CommonShore posted:How many taps are you doing? Too fuggin' many for not having a lovely snowmobile (15) Edit: also didn't realize there was a more general thread I should probably post in instead.... See above inserted picture. Slow is Fast fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Mar 8, 2023 |
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Mar 8, 2023 17:48
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Slow is Fast posted:Tree there's a more general thread? I plan to do about 15 trees too, in the end, but they're all within close walking distance of my house.
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Mar 8, 2023 19:48
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I really don't understand what makes Western Broadleaf maples tick. For the last three weeks we've had what should have been ideal weather - below freezing at nights, snow on the ground, sun in the day and we only had a significant number of taps flowing for a couple of days just before the weekend. Some of the trees have started to produce "earthy" tasting sap so that's it for the season I guess. Because WBLM is so erratic after we start collecting in November we boil down small amounts to around 50% and stash it in the fridge. This weekend we hauled it out and finished boiling to 66%. We ended up with a little under 2 litres of finished syrup. Not great, we've had 3 or 4 times that much in years past. Enough for our personal use and 3 very tiny mason jars to give to friends curious about what the local maples taste like. I left the taps in our best producer, a little copse immediately behind the house, for a few more days to see what developed. It too has developed a taste this morning so I pulled the taps and am boiling down the 1+ litres of sap a bit for some chai tea.  Hopefully the bee hives survived the winter. It's time for their shift to start.
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Mar 8, 2023 20:31
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Mar 8, 2023 23:30
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The seven-day forecast has wrapped over again: We had one day that nudged above freezing and we're back down to a high of -8 or so for the next week. This is brutal. I was hoping to get my cold hardy crops into the greenhouse in the next week or two and the door is still frozen shut.
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Mar 15, 2023 14:57
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Well lets see how the weather is looking  The only thing that's being messed up worse than my mental health is my syrup
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Mar 19, 2023 15:07
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The weather is just not cooperating this year.Hexigrammus posted:Hopefully the bee hives survived the winter. It's time for their shift to start. They didn't. 100% mortality, all 5 hives dead. I have exceeded Saskatchewan's 80% number last winter. No clear indication wtf. Things were good going into the winter, so probably parasites that managed to boom during the unseasonably mild winter spells we had, along with the stress of the periods of (for us) deep cold. I've ordered a couple of replacements but they won't be ready until after the maple flowers are done, one of our major nectar sources.  I need to avoid this. Maybe it's time to put in a sugar beet crop. It will probably wither and die under the intense summer heat from the great hulking El Nino building up in the Western Pacific atm. Hopefully I won't lose any more maples to summer water stress and anthracnose.
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Mar 19, 2023 16:52
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Our bee neighbour lost all of his bees last winter and did without for 2022. IDK if he's planning to get more for 2023.
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Mar 19, 2023 16:56
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We did another 35-40 gal boil last week and pulled our taps. Getting real warm here. It's a home gamer setup and we finished with 2 - 2.5 gallons of syrup so call it a win. I want to get into bee hives and honey, but we just don't have the time this year with finishing the house, horses, and starting a garden and greenhouse plus other tasks. Maybe for 2024, but I've heard a lot of people having issues of them not making it through the winter and that kind of wards me off. Home brew is next now that syrup is done for us.
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Mar 20, 2023 20:21
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It has been a while. There was even a news story this week that this is the worst year anyone can remember for syrup here but... Got 12l into the fire today. Bonus puppy  Say hi to Milton. She's 11 weeks old, so roughly as old as this thread
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Apr 17, 2023 20:01
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Actually funny things happen when you sit around outside. Noticed the burn barrel and figured I could save some propane by cooking with woodshop scraps instead.
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Apr 17, 2023 20:47
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Depending on the wood it'll also make the syrup taste better (or a lot better)
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Apr 17, 2023 21:03
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Soul Dentist posted:Depending on the wood it'll also make the syrup taste better (or a lot better) I'm keeping hte lid on to minimize the smoke exposure because the wood is a whole mix of different kinds. There's some maple in there but also some pine.
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Apr 17, 2023 21:49
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18 litres today bringing my running total up to 30. Having to run multiple pots. Thinking about digging up more taps today from somewhere idk.
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Apr 22, 2023 17:14
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Made the mistake of letting friends tap our birch trees. Now learn the more dependable of the two doesn't even have a pot? Guess I get to watch sap boil all weekend
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Apr 22, 2023 17:38
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Epitope posted:Made the mistake of letting friends tap our birch trees. Now learn the more dependable of the two doesn't even have a pot? Guess I get to watch sap boil all weekend sounds like you're getting some syrup.
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Apr 22, 2023 19:09
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