Maple Syrup

I’ve read that sugar maples produce the sweetest. We have about 15 or so in our yard, and I only tap 8 each year to get 40 gallons of sap for me, and 40 gallons of sap for a friend, who cooks his down himself. It only takes two weeks or so from the time they start running, to collect the 80 gallons. We use two taps per tree. We also have a dozen red maples. I’ve learned that they run later than the sugars, and after tapping them one year,honestly, I can’t tell the difference in the flavor of the syrup.
Have tried all kinds of home-made ways of collecting, but have settled on the Chinese Sap Sak holders (no, not a joke) available at Andersons. Very convenient to hang a 4 +/- gallon heavy duty bag they sell separately. Convenient to pour into collection buckets and re-hang for more collection. It hangs on one tap, which dispenses directly into the bag, and you can run a small hose into the bag from a second tap.

Anyway, there are some good tips on here for cooking and filtering the sap. Might try the egg tip for my second batch.

All good info.

We have been cooking ours down with the burner on the outdoor grill. Boiling it in a big canning pot. Wish this went a little faster. Last night was the 1st time we let it cook all night. If I had to guess it seems to take a full 20# propane tank to cook down 10 to 15 gallons of sap to the point that we can bring it in and finish it. At about $14 a tank refill that doesnt seem to bad to me. Sure am glad I have a second tank so that we can keep a full one on hand all the time.

Upgrades for next year might be to run a natural gas line out from the house. Been wanting to do this for a while anyways for a new grill. Unlimited very cheap gas going this route.

I too appreciate the stroll down memory lane. I used to help my brother-in-law tap trees 25 or so years ago. It was work with the hand drill and bit at first but he moved to a more modern and efficient method later on. I remember tapping in the beginning then pulling the taps and you had to reach up for them as the snow melted down. It was great to be apart of the changing season live. He would also save a small baby food bottle of each batch he boiled down to see the clarity difference of each batch. Sometimes it would start out darker, get lighter, and then back to darker as the season drew to a close and at other times just start out light and get darker. The variation and difference made you think more about what was really going on in the natural world and it’s affect. As I have aged that and other natural wonders have me looking more at the big picture and even more at my personal impact on it.

To increase your boiling down time, have a square or rectangular pan made. It can be regular steel about 16 or maybe 18 gauge ( not galvanized ) or stainless if you want the extra cost. Get it bent up and weld the corners. A small back yard tapping scenario–maybe less than 25-40 taps (or less)–a pan 24″ by 24″ or by 30″ would be fine. No more than 6″- 7″ deep. Put some kind of handles on it. Maybe a drain/valve set up–in one CORNER so it can tipped up on one end to drain it dry when it has hot liquid gold in it.

This will give you more surface for more/faster steam to boil off. That size pan should fit on an outdoor deep fryer burner just fine–centered carefully. Lean some metal sheets against the sides of the pan of whatever sorts to shield the wind /hold the heat in when boiling.

Yup–hook up a main gas line to the cooker and you will be much better off.

Think we are getting to the end of our tapping season here on the north side of the twin cities. Daytime temps are looking to be in the 60s and 70s the next few days. Nights in the low 30s on the cooler nights. Havent seen any cloudy sap yet but got a few trees that the buds look like they are about ready to open up any day. Going to leave the taps in for a few more days just to see what happens but keeping any sap collected separate from the rest we have collected.

Pretty happy with what we got this year for our little back yard operation. After cooking down today we should have about 20 pints of syrup. That was from a dozen taps that we rigged up using milk jugs and bendy straws. Think we could easily add an additional 8 to 10 taps from our yard for next year but one of the issues we had this year was running out of things to store the collected sap in. Going to work on improving our cook down time for next year to. The round canning pot on the grill burner worked but is pretty slow. Easily a couple of days to cook down 10 gallons.

Would imagine some of you guys to the north of us are right in the middle of the season. Farther up might just be starting. Like I said think it getting to the end for us here on the north side of the twin cities. Time to get back to fishing.

My next door neighbor and I decided to start doing maple sap this year (we both just built our houses in the last two year and now have land). He had one of our other neighbors build an evaporator, and we both started buying the needed supplies.

Together we had about 20 trees tapped and have cooked around 100 gallons so far(two different days). The first cooking was a learning process on how to get the fire hot enough, we just were not getting the boil we wanted. I finally hooked up a mattress blower to a long pipe and forced air into the cooker, and man did that make a difference. We are now doing around 6-7 gallons/hour, but I am pretty sure we can improve that.

Our first round turned out watery as we were doing it just with a digital thermometer, so I ended up getting a hydrometer for the next batch and man did that help! Our second batch turned out great, the correct consistency with no niter in it.

This is something I decided to start doing this year just as another thing to do with the kids. They loved going out and collecting the same with me, and in a few years will hopefully be more interested in the cooking phase (long hours there)!

We pulled our taps over the past few days I am doing one last final cook on Thursday (I have another 60 waiting). It’s been a little tough with young kids to find days to boil all day long…but we will have 3 full days this year.

I am now hooked on this…another new hobby to do around home and enjoy with the kids.

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Hey everyone. I’m making my own maple syrup for the first time and I have a question. I boiled all day yesterday and had to shut down before finishing my batch because it just got too late. So I covered my pan (with about 3 gal of sap still in it) with aluminum foil and let it sit out on my outdoor fireplace. It got down to 37° last night so I figured that was fine. Today however, it’s about 60° right now and it’s still sitting out there. I was just about to start my fire back up to finish it but I wanted to ask…..is there a problem with doing this? I’ll be boiling it so if any bacteria formed, it would be killed as soon as I boil it again. Does anyone see a problem here or should I just get my fire going?

Thanks!

Travis Mikula wrote:

Hey everyone. I’m making my own maple syrup for the first time and I have a question. I boiled all day yesterday and had to shut down before finishing my batch because it just got too late. So I covered my pan (with about 3 gal of sap still in it) with aluminum foil and let it sit out on my outdoor fireplace. It got down to 37° last night so I figured that was fine. Today however, it’s about 60° right now and it’s still sitting out there. I was just about to start my fire back up to finish it but I wanted to ask…..is there a problem with doing this? I’ll be boiling it so if any bacteria formed, it would be killed as soon as I boil it again. Does anyone see a problem here or should I just get my fire going?

Thanks!

ZERO problem! Go ahead without any concern.

One thing you do NOT want to do while storing uncooked or partially cooked sap is to cover it tightly. It will mold quicker if it sealed up tight. Cover it to keep bugs/leaves or the like out of it and keep in as cool a place possible but let it have open air too.

In fact, you can add to the same batch of sap for days on end without finishing it off-cooking it down each day to keep up with your daily take. Then after you have enough per your estimated plan, you can quit adding sap and boil it down in one bigger amount of finished syrup. It will get much darker doing that process but taste the same or even better than if it is finished off each and every day and “so called” a better color.

Feel free to call me if you have any questions…651-270-3383 cell#

Hi Steve! Thanks for all the info. Unfortunately, I did end up dumping what I had. I was trying to boil it down using wood in my outdoor fireplace but it was windy and I ended up with lots of ash in my sap from the wood. I figured I’d just start over using propane cookstoves instead. I collected 28 gallons of sap yesterday so I started my stoves at about 6 this morning and I have sap boiling now. Hopefully I’ll be able to boil down a lot of what I have so I can go get more!

Randy,

That looks just like the shack that my grandfather had back in the woods when I was a little kid 50 some odd years ago.

My dad used to cook every spring for Reynold’s Maple Syrup back in the 60’s, at the time they were one of the largest producers in the country if not the largest. I can remember all of the locals bringing tanks full of sap in to their huge plant. They had about 10-12 large pans that were 8 feet wide and probably 30 feet long with large hoods over them to capture the steam.

Now they use RO filters to take a lot of the water out before boiling to cut down on time and fuel. All of the trees have plastic lines that are attached to a vacuum pump, the pump sucks the sap out and into a tank. That tank is then pumped across the field to a large holding tank on the truck for transport to the cooking facility. No more carrying and emptying buckets by hand.

Travis Mikula wrote:

Hi Steve! Thanks for all the info. Unfortunately, I did end up dumping what I had. I was trying to boil it down using wood in my outdoor fireplace but it was windy and I ended up with lots of ash in my sap from the wood. I figured I’d just start over using propane cookstoves instead. I collected 28 gallons of sap yesterday so I started my stoves at about 6 this morning and I have sap boiling now. Hopefully I’ll be able to boil down a lot of what I have so I can go get more!

Use an old window screen/frame — not too big but at least wide enough to cover your pan surface–and scoop the ash out. Ash is no problem– after all we all have smoke/ash and the like in our syrup if cooking outside in the open–that is filtered out later. If the window screen is too big, use a round grease splatter frying pan screen-maybe 10″ in diameter that has a handle –to scoop stuff off the boiling sap. Don’t throw the sap away!! LOL That hurt reading it….

So we finished 24 gallons of sap down to 5 pints of beautiful syrup; however, I didn’t get the sugar sand out. I didn’t know (from lack of reading close enough I guess) that you have to use a different filter for filtering the syrup to get the sugar sand out of it. I just used a nut milk bag that I used to filter the sap with. That obviously didn’t do the job. Now what? Can I just dump all the syrup back into a pot, heat it up to 200 degrees and then re-filter it? Are there any alternatives to the filter paper? I’m going to be boiling again on Saturday and can’t get any filter paper from Amazon in time and don’t really know where to find the stuff.