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!