Ah, the life of farming. You work your butt-off for something, only to have it blow-up in your face.

I guess these days I’m never surprised, and try to let these things roll-off like water (if it’s something hard to prevent, and even the ones that were a stupid mistake).

This one, is STILL a bit of a shocker though.

If you know anything about cooking maple syrup first-hand, you know the single most important thing to NEVER do is let your syrup foam-up and scorch.

We keep a big bottle of anti-foaming oil on hand (often in-hand) just in case! Anti-foaming oil is a blend of highly refined seed oils that break the tension of sugary sap-syrup when it begins to foam. It’s so refined that it breaks down almost instantly and forms a scum on the surface of the cooking syrup that you scoop out with a filter stick. It in no way affects the flavor or quality of the syrup . . . unless you do something dumb like dump the whole bottle in!

In the old days, they used butter. But butter affects the flavor and the texture of pure syrup, and we now have access to better quality oils that do the same job, so most people don’t use butter anymore.

With our pan system, we have two potential types of foam-ups: in the sap pans, and in the syrup pans.

The sap pans typically foam within minutes of adding fresh wood to the fire. The burst of extra heat meets a flood of fresh sap and the sap begins to foam. 2-3 drops of anti-foaming oil over it and poof! its gone.

The syrup pan is completely different. When the syrup pan foams, that usually a sign the sugar content spiked too high, too fast and it’s busy converting itself from maple syrup to maple candy! When this happens, it’s because the syrup was not released from your cooker and now it’s beginning to back up into the other pans, which is preventing new syrup from entering the pans. The syrup boils so fast it LIFTS off the bottom of the pan, which allows the pan to super heat itself and instantly BURN anything that suddenly touches it. It also RUINS YOUR PANS.

Adding anti-foaming oil to a syrup pan does not help unless you douse it. Better is to open the syrup valve and let out the syrup into your filtering unit, and let new sap in from the back pans. You could also quickly ladle sap-syrup from your back pans into the front pan to help thin it.

I had this exact issue earlier in the season. Luckily that did not burn my pans or my syrup.

HOWEVER, the one that happened last weekend DID.

It was our LAST cook of the season. We were excited to see how much syrup we’d actually finish-up with. The cooker pan usually retains about 5 gallons of pure syrup inside, but it’s mixed into 15-20 gallons of sap-syrup. On our last cook, we dump the two syrup pans into 5 gallon buckets, then dump all the sap from our sap pans into 5 gallon buckets. Then we cook this all down on a separate cooker.

Had we done exactly that, we MIGHT not have burned our syrup into nothingness. But we didn’t.

We had roughly 50 gallons of sap sitting out back that I’d collected earlier in the week. It wasn’t much, maybe 3 hours of cooking and might produce 1 gallon of syrup. It didn’t seem worth it to me.

I knew our neighbors across the street also cooked syrup, but since they tapped silver maples, they had a rough year with very little sap. I thought they might appreciate 50 gallons to cook.

Erik didn’t like my idea to give them our sap, and he decided we should just cook it.

Everything was rolling like normal, all systems “go”. I’d been tending the fire, and splitting wood (and coughing and hacking and choking on the smoke that was aggravating my cold).

The temperature on the syrup pan was climbing quickly, and soon it was already up to 219! I realized I had for gotten our hydrometer cup to test the sugar content and decide what temp would be syrup.

I ran-in to get it, but realized I had forgotten to wash it. I quickly ran hot water through it to clear the sticky syrup out, then I popped back outside.

Erik was tending the fire and jumped out at me instantly!

“You didn’t open the filer box and now you’ve got syrup everywhere because it hit syrup temp while you were gone!”

Now Erik was totally joking, but he was trying to get me worked up. This is also something I could see myself doing and something he would yell at me about.

Unfortunately, while he was busy harassing me, and I was trying to clear my sick, foggy brain and remember what I had been about to do, no one noticed the pans. He started to crack the valve to open the syrup into the filter box, but I told him to turn it off until I knew what temp it needed to be.

I was having a rough time scooping syrup out to dump into the hydrometer. The cooker had been leaking smoke more and more and that day was especially bad. It seemed the syrup was to temp, but thanks to the smoke, my foggy brain and Erik still harassing me, what happened next should NOT have happened.

Were I by myself, I could think better with a foggy brain. I would have run through all my steps logically like I always do. Check the syrup sugar with hydrometer, open filter box, set temp on computer system, set switch to “auto”, check the back pans. When syrup begin to release from the valve, check temp on computer and adjust valve as needed.

However, my foggy brain is easily confused and distracted and has a hard time fighting through the fog to remember what I was doing before getting distracted.

No one turned the computer back to “auto”.

The syrup hit fast and hard, and like lightning it shot through every single pan.

I was the first to notice the smell, and asked Erik what he’d done. He instantly took offense, not thinking that with a major cold I couldn’t ask exactly nicely but everything comes out gruff and husky-sounding. So again, more time wasted arguing about how I asked my question.

Meanwhile, the smell of burned sugar was filling my nose. If someone is scooping scum off the surface of the sap pans and dumping it behind the evaporator, it often hits the chimney and causes a burned smell. This is what I’d figured Erik had done.

Unfortunately, as we walked back into the shack to find out what was going on, EVERY SINGLE PAN was a pile of foam.

Erik quickly shoved the float box down to try to flood the pans with cold, fresh sap while I began dousing the pans with foaming oil.

NOTHING WAS WORKING!

Thinking fast, I quickly ran out and grabbed a bucket of sap I’d brought back from the woods and dumped it into the pans to try to cool them. Erik was standing by the fan plug and I kept yelling at him to pull the plug! Finally it dawned on him what I was saying and we shut the system down.

But it was too late.

Giant chunks of charred syrup began floating up like bodies in a shipwreck from the bottom of the flues. I silently scooped-out the remains of the dead and piled them behind the evaporator.

I carefully ladled-out some of the syrup and tasted it.

Gone. All gone. All 6 gallons down the drain.

It tasted like the charred remains of a marshmellow reduced to a pile of ashes.

And just like that, our maple syrup season was done.

No one could have predicted what happened. It was only our second year using this system and as the more cooks you do the more concentrated the sap gets. You can’t point the finger and say it was anyone’s fault, and you can run through a mile-long list of things that could have been done differently. Ultimately though, you just never know what will happen.

I now have the unpleasant task of finding out how badly damaged our pans are. Hopefully they just need cleaning. Sometimes though, pans are totally destroyed in syrup burns.

It is with a heavy heart that I am officially closing-out maple syrup season. For us it’s been a bit of a bust thanks to temperatures hitting too high, too early in the season. We collected less sap this year than last year, and cooked it down into fewer gallons.

However, nothing is a complete bust if you’ve managing to come away from it learning something new and useful. And this year we really did!

Way back when we visited the maple syrup warehouse to buy our supplies, the owner showed us a newly completed research paper that showed how using new taps every year could increase your sap production significantly.

Erik was incredibly skeptical, but we bought 25 new taps as a test to see if the research was correct.

Guess what?

When the production slowed on our trees, and out of 150 old taps we’d have roughly 10 buckets with maybe 2 gallons each, ALL our new taps had AT LEAST 2 gallons, some even 5! The trees were tapped at the same time and in the same area, but those new taps ALL OUT PERFORMED THE OLD TAPS.

It was a bittersweet discovery. We now knew to buy all new taps next year, but had we done it this year we could have quadrupled our syrup this year.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

The taps we use are plastic (I’m not sure if metal taps have the same issues), and plastic is slightly permeable. Bacteria can find tiny niches and stay dormant even after washing thoroughly (which is nearly impossible with a tap anyway). When it once again has warm, sugary, tree sap flowing through it, the bacteria begin multiplying and spreading along the tap until it reaches the tree. The tree senses the bacteria and instantly begins trying to heal itself to prevent rot. It starts to seal over the hole.

The minute temperatures reach 50 degrees, that bacteria begins multiplying like crazy and the tree begins to close.

Long ago, taps were made of metal, and were much larger. It’s very likely they never had this issue before. With the invention of “tree-friendly” taps in smaller diameters and made out of plastic, the issue of taps closing too early seems to be a new one.

Bottom line: if your season seems to be less productive than it should have been, buy new taps every year. They make cheaper, disposable taps for this very purpose.

Well, it’s done for some people apparently!

The other day Erik’s Dad called me up (expect an hour-long conversation) and asked me how our trees were doing. I told him they were fine, that we were glad we tapped early, but the season is going to be a long one!

He sounded shocked. Then he told me about a news story just on TV about the maple syrup season being very poor this year. A maple man in Ada they had interviewed said that the season was about over thanks to poor conditions.

He may in fact, be correct. We have roughly 175 taps out right now. Out of the 175, five are Red Maple trees. The others are all blacks and sugars. Reds and silvers are different than blacks and sugars in that they both produce large red buds that turn into red flowers (and probably irritate your allergies).

If I’m remembering correctly, the reds and silvers produce fruit (those helicopter seeds kids love to play with) in the spring, while the sugars and blacks produce them in the fall.

If you are curious as to whether you have a red or silver maple, look up right now. Red maples will have extra large buds, with silvers being slightly smaller. A pair of binoculars will help you see if the buds have “burst” and flowered. Or simply look at the ground for fallen buds.

Warm temperatures in the 50’s or higher will cause the buds to swell and burst into flower — thus ending your maple syruping for that tree. Anyone tapping a red or silver must constantly check their sap. Sap from a budding maple will turn “buddy”, which is a bitter, off taste you DON’T want!

More often than not, the red or silver maple will simply stop flowing sap.

With all that useful information lodged in your brain, now lets look at our tree tapping results.

I have a handy little picture of two buckets of sap from two different trees, but my phone’s memory is full and won’t let me send the photo to my computer, so you’ll just have to close your eyes to picture it.

Wait, no,  don’t do that — you won’t be able to read this!

So, 170 black/sugar maples and five Red Maples. The 170 have ranged in bucket values accrued over two days from one gallon to three gallons (in a five gallon bucket). The Red Maples? One-quarter of a gallon or less. More like one to two cupfuls.

Wait, don’t panic! You are correct to assume the low levels of sap mean the trees have flowered. I’ve found branches with open buds on the ground. Those five buckets have all been dumped and will be taken down so no one mistakenly empties them next week.

For a maple syrup producer who relies on red and silver maples, they most likely HAVE ended their season. Our neighbors across the street have tapped a swamp full of massive Silver Maples (as they do every year for fun). We tapped silver and reds our first 3 years doing maple syrup. Those in the swamp/wet areas have a hard time thawing enough to flow well, and then they suddenly “pop” in warm weather. Last year I saved our season of 150 buckets by moving them all to the blacks and sugars we are tapping right now. That gave our season an additional 2 weeks.

I’m not sure if our neighbors have been able to collect enough sap to even cook down. Hopefully they did, because most likely they, like the guy in Ada, are done.

As for US? We are cooking down another 260 gallons of sap tomorrow. I’ve got another 100 gallons or so to collect today. I have checked the long-range forecasts and it appears our maple syrup season will last well into April (usually is done by April 1). That would give us a full 8 weeks. That would be a GOOD syrup season for us.

One more bonus . . .

Our syrup so far seems to have a kettle corn flavor which will probably mature into caramel corn flavor. Very light, sweet and buttery with notes of vanilla. Saturday we will get our first round of syrup and will know then EXACTLY what the flavor scale is!

Yesterday we went out to the Maple Supply Warehouse out in Lake Odessa. It’s always interesting going to these places since the owners know so much about making syrup. As this was a new start-up operation (the old one retired) we had a lot to discuss.

Today’s post is an interesting one: maple math.

While people assume farmers are dumb, the opposite is actually true. Farmers have to CREATIVELY use their math skills to ACTIVELY sold problems. We are one of the few that actually still use that math you learned in High School (when am I ever going to use this?!).

If you plan to tap more than a few trees, you’ll need to brush your math skills off. Here’s why:

We plan to tap just over 150 trees (and just bought an extra 25 taps and buckets). We can certainly tap well over 300 trees, but we are sticking to 150 for now.

Here’s the math:

If, on average, a tree tap yields enough sap to make 1/2 gallon of syrup during a good season, that tree has produced 22.5 gallons of sap (assuming your sugar content is such that it takes 45 gallons of sap to produce a gallon of syrup. Sometimes it’s40, sometimes it’s 50).

WHY DO YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS?

If you have 150 taps, that’s about 75 gallons of maple syrup . . . WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO PUT ALL THAT?!

You certainly don’t sell your syrup as gallon jugs, usually it’s in quarts. But that’s 300 quart jugs (4 quarts = 1 gallon).

Crazy lots.

ROUND 2

Ok, so let’s look at the sap amounts now. If each tree produces good numbers of sap at 22.5 gallons for the season, multiply that by 150 (number of trees tapped). That’s 3,375 gallons of sap for the whole season.

Seems like a lot, right?

Well, if your season is (on average) 6 weeks long, that’s 562.5 gallons a week! You’d better have enough storage for all that sap!

Fortunately we have 3, 275-gallon tanks, and that means we will fill just over two tanks a week (562.5gallons per week/275gallons per tank=2.04 tanks).

That means cooking twice a week!

Ok. so you have 562.5 gallons a week. Each tree tap has one bucket, and each bucket can hold 5 gallons. 562.5gallons/7days = 80 gallons of sap collected PER DAY.

Now that’s curious . . .  we have 150 taps out, but are only collecting ON AVERAGE 80 gallons. A good day will yield 1 gallon a day. An excellent day will yield over 2! However, some days yield 0, so that’s why we average.

But this is why we do the math. Numbers that seem EXTRA-ORDINARY at first, show to be average to below average once you break it down.

SO now you might be wondering, “What happened last year?”

Well, we DID do 150 taps last year, however, it was a bad season for ALL sap farmers with the weather warming up so fast. Half our trees had been silver and red maples. It wasn’t until the last 2 weeks I tapped 75 black maples (saved our butts too!). We only had taps out for 4 weeks total.

Last year our sap sugar content averaged 1.5%. Many producers dump it if it’s that low because it takes too long to cook. We didn’t have that option.

We ended up producing around 15 gallons of syrup from 150 taps. Pretty far cry from 75, huh?

But this is why farming is a “gamble” you know what you could/should get, but there’s only so much you can control on YOUR end.

Honestly? If we ended up with 75 gallons of syrup this year, we would have NO PLACE TO STORE IT. We would fill every jug we have and need to run to the syrup warehouse again and buy MORE!

I fully expect to get at least 30 gallons, but it’s still a gamble! It could be 15, it could be 75 . . . throw the dice and hold your breath!

Step 1: pick your trees.

The best time is in the fall before the leaves fall, but are still changing color. If you have a high canopy, the easiest way to tell what type of tree you are looking at is by the color of the leaves. In our area, we have four types of maples: Silver, Red, Black and Sugar. I’ve listed them from lowest sugar content to highest sugar content. Trying to identify WHICH type of maple it is will leave you in a frenzy, so for now just be happy you are not looking at an oak tree! It’s not widely talked about, but maple trees DO interbreed. So while your leaf may APPEAR to be a Red Maple, it might be a cross between a red maple and a silver. And blacks and sugars are often confused as the same tree (there are very slight differences). So just find some maples and be happy. For us, I’ve finally narrowed our trees down to strictly blacks and sugars (years 1 and 2 were solid reds and silvers, year 3 was a mix).

Step 2: Find the right size.

Ideally your tree must be at least 12 inches wide (some say 8). For every additional 6 inches of width, you can put on an additional tap. So a 24” tree could have 2-3 taps.

Step 3: Drill your holes and tap!

We use 5/16 drill bits and taps, and put a ¾” hole into the tree, roughly waist-height. We gently tap our 5/16 spouts into the holes. We have 24” clear tubing dropping from each tap into a bucket on the ground.

Step 4: Collect

MAKE SURE EVERYTING IS CLEAN! I cannot stress this enough. Sap contains sugars, and will grow bacteria VERY quickly. While cooking sap kills the bacteria, it WILL discolor your syrup. This gets harder in warmer weather, and mold will start growing within minutes of sap dropping into the pail. Usually by this point, the holes you have drilled will cover over thanks to that same bacteria and will no longer produce for you. Sure you COULD drill new holes, but again, if your sap is rotting, why keep collecting it?

We transfer all of our 5 gallon buckets of sap into a giant container on our side by side, then drive THAT over to a LARGER container that holds nearly 300 gallons.

Step 5: COOK!

Once this container is full, we drive it by tractor up to our sugar shack and connect it to our cooking unit. A long hose connects the container to the cooker, allowing sap to flow out as needed. A RAGING fire is created in the fireplace under the pan (known as an arch), and the heat reaches temps well over 600 degrees! Hot enough to melt your snow pants if you get too close! The fire is re-stocked every 5 to 8 minutes with more tiny wood chunks until the sap at the very end of the pan reaches syrup consistency at anywhere from 121 degrees to 123 degrees. Some people say that you only need to cook it to 117 degrees, but this is not accurate. The temp you cook to is variable depending on the atmospheric pressure. Syrup Cooks use a tool called a hydrometer that measures the barometric pressure and cross it to the current temperature to tell you where your syrup needs to cook to. We use a “Murphy’s Cup”, which is the easiest way to do this in one step.

Our cooker has a temperature sensor set-up that spits the syrup out as soon as the end batch reaches the ideal temp. Under the spigot, we have a high-end filter/bottling unit. Our syrup goes through 10 pre filters and one main filter before collecting in the bin. The bin keeps it hot and allows us to bottle whenever we get a free moment. It holds up to 3 gallons as a time. A 300 gallon tank will spit out 6 to 6.5 gallons of pure syrup!

You MUST bottle at 185 to 195 degrees. This ensures no mold will grow, and no sugar crystals will form!

Maple syruping is one of the most time consuming and energy consuming farming activities. But it’s a lot of fun. If you enjoy sitting around a campfire, you’ll really love cooking syrup. You get the fun of a fire with the added excitement of watching something cook, and the surprise when the system releases loads of syrup into your filters. You never know when the temperature will hit a sweet spot and suddenly release! Plus you don’t have to worry about smoke in your face . . . it all goes up the chimney!

Let’s not forget the tasting part. We always keep a ladle on the end for tasting the syrup! There really are few things better than freshly-cooked syrup, still piping hot!

We never turn away company during a cook, and you’ll know by the sheer amount of steam forming a cloud in the sky, or the sweet smell of syrup on the evening breeze. Stop-in and you can walk-away with a bottle still hot!

We try to cook every Saturday, but depending on the load I usually end up doing a batch during the week as well! It can take as long as 12 hours to complete a full batch!