Making Maple Syrup

   Living in the woods does have some advantages, one of which is having plenty of maple trees to tap. This is our second year making syrup and we wanted to speed up production a little bit. Last year we used just to pans over an open fire, but this year I made an evaporator that holds three pans. The evaporator worked great, although the sides got a little bit warped it still kept a lot of the heat inside to boil the sap.

   Instead of using the metal spike and metal buckets we use a plastic tap, vinyl tubing, and a five gallon bucket. The tap and tubing are a lot cheaper then the metal ones and we have plenty of buckets to use. We just drilled a hole in the top side of the bucket, then drilled a hole in the tree. Next we put the tap in the tree, hook up one end of the tubing to the tap and pushed the end into the bucket. We ended up using a scrap piece of wood for the top, because the plastic tops were too hard to keep taking on and off .All we did then was wait for the nights to be below freezing and the days to be above 40 degrees.

   We ended up taping ten trees and most of them gave us at least 5 gallons of sap each. When the time was right we fired up the evaporator. I started around 8:30 in the morning by lighting the fire and then filled up each pan with sap. About every half an hour or so I would pour more sap in as it boiled off. The center pan seem to boil off faster , so I made sure to fill that one up a little higher. Once I ran out of sap, I poured the end pans into the center one and boiled the sap tell it got to color I wanted. At 6:30 in the afternoon, I got the color I wanted. Next I poured the syrup through some cheese cloth to strain out all the particles in it and then put it in our large pot. 

The next morning I fired up the wood stove in the house and then put the pot on top of the stove to slowly bring it to the color of amber syrup  To make sure it was right, I would scoop out a little and put in the fridge to cool. After about ten minutes in the fridge, I would try it to make sure it was the right consistence.  Once I was happy with it, I poured it into canning jars and sealed them. We ended up with about a gallon and a quarter.

   Just like last year, after making the syrup we want to put more buckets out next year, but just like last year I'm sure we'll run out of time.