Ok, the howling was from the neighbor’s dogs, and I was really just sitting on my porch steps, but it was dark because I had been trying to boil that stuff down for hours to no avail. My maple syrup ended up just being maple water.

But it was a pleasantly warm evening because I had been saving my maple sap for months in plastic coffee containers in my deep freeze. After all, I needed to have a lot before I could cook it down.

When I embarked on my maple syrup journey, I had heard of regular folks who strung up milk jugs in the trees to collect that lovely nectar, so I thought for sure I could do this, especially since I had found some fancy-looking metal buckets designed especially for the task with a spout (spile), lid, and all. I only got three buckets because I just wanted to give the process a try.

When I posted my initial efforts on Facebook with pictures of these containers hanging from the trees, I got comments obviously meant to discourage me.

“They say it takes nine gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup,” one person said.

“I think it takes 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of maple syrup,” another said.

And I said, “If I only make an ounce, it will be an ounce well worth it. I just need to see if I can do it!”

When I looked it up, it was indeed 40-43 gallons to a gallon, but who’s counting? I’m sure it varies, especially when some types of trees have more sugar in their sap than others.

I had done my research and learned that they didn’t necessarily have to be sugar maples; just about any kind of maple tree can be tapped. Sugar maples are said to have the highest sugar content, but red, black, and silver maples also work. Trees with less sugar would need to be boiled down longer to get a comparable sugar content.

Not only maples, but other types of trees can be tapped as well, including black walnut, which is said to have a—surprise, surprise!—nutty flavor. Birch can also be tapped, and is said to taste more like molasses; box elder can be tapped for a syrup with a milder taste. And then there is sycamore, which is supposed to taste like butterscotch. Yum! There is also hickory syrup, but it is more often made with the bark, and that makes me want to learn more. But back to tapping trees—well, I’ll stay on the bark topic long enough to mention that I once saw a movie about escaped holocaust victims who survived in the woods in the winter by cutting bark and using it as face masks to keep from getting frostbite. Such ingenuity!

Ok, so back to my maple syrup journey. Now all I needed to do was look around at the trees in the woods on my property and ask myself, what kind are they? Deciphering which trees are which isn’t very easy for some of us. I’ve tried to learn to identify trees from their leaves and bark, and I recognize the most obvious ones like oak and maple, but that is in the summer when they have leaves, and even then, some trees have leaves that are too high to see.

But maple I recognize because my yard is full of maple leaves in the fall, so maple is what I chose. I also did a Google search to identify the type of maple leaves and concluded they actually were sugar maple.

I’d also read that there is a certain time for collecting sap, so it varies from one region to another depending on when the weather warms up enough for the sap to start running in the trees. It is best to collect it in early spring from around February to March when there are freezing nights of temperatures below 32° Fahrenheit and days warm up to above freezing in the 40s. The cycle of freezing and thawing causes pressure changes that make the sap flow. This can last for four to six weeks, but you should stop collecting it when the trees begin to bud out because this can cause the sap to taste bad. I tapped my trees from Feb. 2 through April 2.

So, first, I grabbed my drill and the correct size bit for my spile. The spile is the little spout that goes into the tree. The size of the bit varies depending upon the size of your spile, usually 5/16″ or 7/16″, if you use one, or perhaps the size of a tube or something else you use to collect sap in. They even make special plastic bags designed for sap collection.

I found three trees that were large enough (at least 10-12 inches in diameter) and chose a spot about 4.5 feet from the ground (as I’d read was important) on each tree and started drilling until I made it through the outer wood and into the empty area where I presumed the sap would flow. A tiny drip came out to let me know I’d hit the right spot. Then I hammered the spout into the hole, tied my collection bucket to the tree, and put its little peaked hat on to keep bugs and rain out. In a larger tree that I tried, I didn’t get that initial drip, but it started to drip a little later. My buckets came with a hanger, but I ended up using some rope to secure them from high winds.

I went out to check the next day and found maybe a half cup of sap in each container, as well as a couple of bugs. I picked out the bugs and poured the sap into an old coffee container and put it in the freezer to be cooked down later, when I’d collected “enough.”

Of course, this was the point in time when I thought of an episode of the show Naked and Afraid where a woman found a vine in the forest that she was able to cut in half and drink from. So, it occurred to me that if I am ever lost in the woods and desperate for something to drink, and I happen to have a sharp knife with me, I might be able to cut deep enough to get some sap. Too bad I don’t normally hike with my drill.

Okay, back to the syrup. So it went like that each day, maybe a cup or cup and a half of sap in each bucket, pouring it into my coffee cans and freezing it in hopes that I would eventually have enough to boil down for a few ounces of syrup. And when I had about 10 cans full of frozen sap (still far from the 30 gallons prescribed), I decided to pick a nice day and start trying to boil it down.

I read that when you boil it down, it will let out quite a bit of sticky steam, so it’s best to do it outside over a fire rather than coating your kitchen walls and ceiling with it, unless you just like the idea of walking into your kitchen and taking a lick at your sweet walls now and then. Hence, me with my fire in the wheelbarrow in the middle of the night because it took way longer than I thought it would. I regret to say that the cup or two of sap that I ended up with after boiling it down as long as possible was just a little bit sweet and nowhere near thicker than water.

But I did learn a few things. Like, even though making the syrup is a little more than I can handle, it’s free sugar water and might be especially useful if you are stranded in the wilderness without something to drink. I guess it might even offer a few calories to sustain you, and the protein in the bugs is a bonus. And don’t forget about covering your face with bark!

But lo and behold, about a year later, some friends invited me to go visit Moonstruck Maple on Brooks Mountain Road in Brooks, WV. Nestled in the Appalachian Mountains, on a long, windy road that made me a bit car sick, these people make gourmet maple infusions (yummy little treats) and pure maple syrup. They share the mountain with Three Rivers Avian Center, which is also a great place to visit if you are into observing big wild birds such as hawks, eagles, falcons, and owls that they have saved and nurtured back to health. The folks from both establishments have a great respect for the birds and other wildlife on that mountain and try their best to conserve it.

But back to the maple syrup. Instead of gathering syrup in containers and taking it back to be cooked, the folks at Moonstruck Maple have run lines from the trees and directly to what is called an evaporator for storage and cooking. The evaporator is housed in a small building called a sugar shack, used specifically for cooking it.

Alisha and Mike Segars are the owners of Moonstruck Maple, and Alisha answered a few questions for me.

She explained that they use food-grade tubing made specifically for the maple syrup industry. They run 15 to 20 taps from the trees onto a series of 3/16-inch lines that run from the trees and join to a lateral line of the same size, which then runs into a 1-inch line that runs into their collection tank. In addition to getting it to the collection tank more easily, tubing also creates a vacuum and pulls more sap out of the trees than might naturally drip out. And they run their lines downhill, so that helps as well.

The sap then goes through a reverse osmosis system, which uses pressure to take out 50% to 75% of the water before the sap enters the evaporator for boiling down. Now that is a big difference! Next, they still must heat the sap by keeping a wood fire burning, but the way the evaporator is designed, it is able to heat up to 700°.

Alisha said they have the largest evaporator in their main building, but they also have a few smaller evaporators positioned in different areas on the property where they tap trees. The evaporator in their main building can hold 3,000 gallons, while the two smaller evaporators can hold 500 to 600 gallons. She bought hers from a company called CDL. But I did find that some companies sell evaporators online for smaller amounts of sap, all the way down to 17.5 gallons.
An evaporator is comprised of a large shallow pan that provides a lot of surface area for evaporation and is heated from the bottom. Some are simple open pans, while others have compartments that are arranged in a serpentine manner so that the sap travels through the system as it heats and moves to the end near the spout when it is finished. Some include a filter, thermometer, and a float to manage how quickly fresh sap is allowed into the heating pan. Some are attached to a heating unit, and others are mere pans that you need to find a way to heat, either by setting them on a grill or over a fire. The main one at Moonstruck Maple includes what amounts to a woodstove underneath that comes as part of the setup.

You can also buy a separate reverse osmosis system, and depending on size and quality, those can cost anywhere from $100 up to a thousand dollars or more, and you can buy systems that filter or use UV rays to sterilize. Basically, you can spend as little or as much as you want to, depending upon whether you do it as a hobby, or hope to sell it on a larger scale, or perhaps just want to get a few dollars at the farmer’s market.

If I chose to do it over again just as a hobby, I don’t think I’d want to run a lot of lines over my property, but I would probably tap a lot more trees to get more sap at once, and use either those special bags or milk jugs (if only I bought milk in jugs)… oh, wait! Can I use plastic coffee cans? Maybe.

And I’d consider buying a small evaporator pan or finding one second hand and maybe using that old charcoal grill that I forgot I had… after I clean the wasp nests out of it.

And if I wanted to get a little more serious about making maple syrup than that, I guess I would consider finding a way to buy a cheap reverse osmosis system because that makes a really big difference. Imagine, 50% to 75% of the moisture removed before you even start cooking it!

The post Lessons From My Maple Syrup Misadventure appeared first on Homestead.org.

Many years later, someone told me that they made their own maple syrup with trees on their own property.  THAT definitely interested me.  If we made our own, we would not have to ration it.

Both methods/recipes have four steps, yet the outcome is very different.

How to Make Small-batch Maple-flavored Liquid

• Mix 1 cup white sugar & 1 cup brown sugar (or all brown sugar for thicker substance) plus 1 cup of water in a saucepan
• Stir and bring to boil (medium-high heat)
• Add 1 tablespoon maple extract
• Stir and simmer 3-4 minutes

How to Make Small-batch REAL Maple Syrup

• Find & mark the correct-sized maple trees
• Return months later to insert taps/tubes/sap collecting vessels (late winter-very early spring)
• Collect sap
• Boil down/evaporate sap for many hours

This year, my husband and I will be entering our third year of maple sugaring.  We used minimal resources the first two years to see if it was something we wanted to invest in and continue saving money to put towards a high-efficiency evaporator (which we hope to begin using next season).

I would like to share our experiences from the last couple of years making maple syrup with our first two methods, using minimal supplies.

Our First Year Making Maple Syrup on the Homestead

We started our syrup experiment by choosing ten trees on our immediate property.  We only chose trees that were easy access from the house.  Bright green flagging tape/ribbon ($3 per roll) was tied around them in summer.

In March (toward the middle of maple-syrup season), we tapped each tree.  We purchased a ten-tree sap-tapping kit (2-foot lengths of 5/16” plastic sap-vacuum tubing and ten taps for $27).  We bought ten one-gallon water jugs with screw-on tops from the grocery store ($5 total).  Water was given to the animals and we kept the jugs.  A 5/16” hole was drilled into each top.  A tap was hammered into a tree; one end of a hose was attached to the tap and the other to a hole in a water-jug cap.

We checked jugs daily, but only collected sap when at least half full.  The sap was stored in food-grade five-gallon buckets with tight-fitting lids.  We already had these buckets so we did not have to buy any, but we did need to buy a few lids.  Temps were cold enough to leave buckets outside in a shady area.  When we collected twenty-five gallons (in almost ten days), we had to boil, as the weather turned warm and we did not have space to store the sap in a refrigerated area.

A simple outdoor fireplace was constructed out of paver bricks. We got ours free on Craigslist. They can also be found on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist for cheap.  We also bought one stainless steel pan (6” steam-table pan for $20).

The sap was boiled down over an open fire for an entire ten-hour day.  As it evaporated, more sap was added.  We learned that someone needs to keep an eye on it at all times.  The ONE moment I asked my husband to come inside for something, it boiled over the top!

That first run yielded one quart of maple syrup.  We spent around $50ish for that quart of syrup.  We collected and boiled down two more batches before calling it quits (weather got far too warm to keep unrefrigerated sap for long), each time getting about a quart.

We decided that we would tap again the next year with more trees and upgrade our equipment.  We would start earlier.  We also learned that we needed a much bigger wood supply for the fire.

Our Second Year Making Maple Syrup on the Homestead

That year we tapped twenty-five trees, again marking the additional maples with bright survey ribbon.  Some of the additional trees were not as accessible (on hilly areas and further away from the house) so we did some bushwhacking to make paths.

Larry built a barrel evaporator (free steel barrel + $50 adapter kit).  He spent a day building it.  No welding, just cutting off the barrel and basic tools are required.

We tapped all twenty-five trees just like the previous year, but this time we waited until we collected forty gallons before boiling.  We had to purchase additional food-grade plastic buckets and lids to store the sap.

Again, the sap took a ten-hour day to boil down each of the two batches, but we yielded a gallon from each run.  Due to work schedules, we were limited to two runs.

That year, we got two gallons of maple syrup.  We learned that we would need to cut and split even more wood and that we needed to start sooner to carve out more time to do more boils.

This coming season we hope to use a high-efficiency evaporator that we were able to finally purchase.  We already have an ample supply of wood, cut and split (we hope!).  In January, we tapped forty-seven trees (many of which are down in the valley, around the swamp) to get a jump start on a possible early spring run.  By the end of the first week of February, we had already collected twenty gallons (using snowshoes and ice cleats).  Larry made a forty-gallon sap-storage container out of a food-grade barrel, to eliminate using all those five-gallon buckets.  He also created an addition onto an existing structure to use as a sugar shack.  We bought a sled to aid in collecting sap down by the swamp.  We created time for boil-downs this spring, invested more time and money into our syrup experiment, and our putting more attention on maple syrup this year.  Let’s see if it pays off!

The post Making Small-batch Maple Syrup on the Homestead appeared first on Homestead.org.

Do you imagine the humble backwoodsman stirring a large cast-iron kettle over an open fire? Perhaps a snowy Maine woods where workers in plaid empty metal buckets into huge vats are being pulled by impressive workhorses. Whatever you imagine, you might be surprised that the innocuous little bottle in your hand (no, not those imposters made from corn syrup) has had a long, sweet—sometimes dark and sticky—history.

Maple sugaring goes back to time immemorial. The Chippewa and Ottawa tribes have a legend about the origin of maple sugaring. The story goes that the syrup, not sap, would flow from the trees year-round and did not need to be processed to enjoy. They would break a branch off and lie underneath as the sweet syrup dripped into their mouths. A “great spirit” saw this and rebuked the people who had grown fat and lazy, and diluted the syrup down by pouring a lake on the trees, thus making it the watery sap that we see today. This spirit also said that the people would not have it year-round, but only for a short time between winter and spring, that they would have to work for their sweet treat and then showed them how to turn the sap into syrup and sugar.

Now, while this is all legend, we do know that the Native peoples were using maple trees for a very long time. It may have started after the long hard winters when food was scarce by chewing on strips of the inner bark of maples as a source of energy. But eventually, the Native Americans began to refine their sugaring technique, cutting long gashes into the trees and collecting the sap that ran out into woven birch baskets. This sap would be left out to freeze and the ice discarded. What was left would be boiled in large wooden troughs where stones heated in fires were dropped into the sap. The sap would often be boiled down to a solid state and used to preserve meats and other foods in a similar way to preserving with salt.

When the European settlers arrived in the New World, they learned the process of maple sugaring from their new neighbors. The earliest known record of maple sugaring from a European source was from one André Thevet the “Royal Cosmographer of France,” in 1557. The Europeans were quick studies, and put their own knowledge and technologies to work in the “sugar bush.”

The Europeans had access to metal tools and pots, which helped to further streamline the process of collecting and boiling. They would drill holes, as opposed to the traditional gashes, into the trees and collected sap into metal or wooden buckets. Once collected, the sap was boiled in a metal kettle directly over a fire, making this process significantly faster.

While the process was sped up, getting a decent yield still required a lot of work. On average, it takes about forty gallons of sap to produce about one gallon of syrup, and a person is still completely at the mercy of the weather. For sap to run, there must be freezing temperatures at night, and above freezing during the day. These fluctuations in temperatures cause pressures to build in the trees which forces the sap to run out of cracks and cuts in the bark. The best time for this is the few weeks as winter gives way to spring.

The early settlers would often head into the sugar bush during the sugaring season with their whole families and not leave until the season was over. They often took security precautions to protect their hard work and precious sugar, such as setting armed guards around the camps or sneaking off in the middle of the night to the sugar bush to avoid detection. The sugar bush itself was often a closely guarded secret and the location of it would not be readily shared.

Once again, sugar was the goal, not necessarily syrup, as it was a rare and expensive commodity, considering that sugar was usually imported from the Caribbean. Tea, coffee, and chocolate were coming into the Colonies, helping drive the sugar demand, but also with that demand came increased taxes. The Molasses Act of 1733 and the Sugar Act of 1764 helped boost activity at the local sugar bush, as drinking tea or coffee sweetened with British sugar was considered downright unpatriotic.

Maple sugar, on top of being used to fight unfair taxes, was also promoted by the Abolitionist movement. The Caribbean sugar was produced on vast sugar plantations using slave labor. The work was hard, hot, and dangerous. Tragically, it was estimated by the British East India Company that it would cost one slave life to produce about 450 pounds of sugar. For the abolitionists, locally-made maple sugar and honey were the chosen sweeteners.

As the Civil War decided the issue of slavery, maple sugaring slowly declined and cane sugar made without slaves began to be the sweetener of choice. This caused the maple sugar producers to switch from sugar to syrup. With this switch came new technologies as well.

As time went on, the often lead-soldered buckets of yesteryear were replaced with plastic bags and tubing. Vacuums are attached to the trees to draw out more sap than a simple hole could ever produce. No longer is the workhorse pulling a vat in the snowy Maine woods; pumps can make the sap run uphill. Tubing can be run from the trees directly to the boiling place, or “sugar shack,” replacing the need to empty containers manually by those plaid-clad workers.

Sap left out to freeze so the ice may be thrown away has been replaced by reverse osmosis equipment which removes some of the water from the sap even before any boiling takes place. The massive black kettles over open fires have been replaced by large flat evaporators which are more efficient and reduce boiling times. Even the wood fire has changed to propane, gas, electric, or steam.

From its humble origins as something to chew on while waiting for spring’s bounty, to the large commercial operations that now pump out those cute little log cabin bottles that grace our breakfast tables, the long rich history of maple sugaring and syrup might be savored best upon a stack of pancakes, or a crepe, in my case.

References:

“Colonialism, maple syrup, and ways of knowing”. Active History. (2018, July 8).

“Celebrating the history of Maple Syrup”. Kendra Wills, M. S. U. E. (2021, March 10). MSU Extension.

“Maple syrup production and slavery”. The Adirondack Almanack. (2015, March 26).

“A brief history of Maple Syrup”. Time. Pickert, K. (2009, April 16).

The post Maple Sugaring: Boiling Down a Long History appeared first on Homestead.org.