Discussion: boiling sap

I may have to pick your brain about this sometime. My kids visited a friend's grandparents sugar house the other day to see how it's done and now they want to do it here next year. It's too bad they didn't take me with them so I could see the setup and ask questions. We have the book, but it seems like one of those things that it would really help to actually see in real life first before trying it at home.

We hunted around the other day and found about 6 or 8 sugar maples near the house, so there goes that excuse.

Really, very easy. First few years I drilled 3/8" holes and drove in a tapered wooden dowel with a hole drilled up the centerline. Sap dripped into empty gallon water jugs. Now I use plastic taps (@$0.39 each from Leaderer) and tubing to run to a few larger jugs.

For boiling, I use an electric deep fryer out on the deck. Works fine and is easier than building a fire outside and better home relations than steaming off the wallpaper inside.

You'll want to tap trees that are at least 12-14" diameter. Each tap can yield up to 10 gal of sap over 2-3 weeks and 1 quart of syrup once boiled down.

Try it! The results are amazing. Simplest reference is Backyard Sugarin, a thin paperback.

Wow, a deep fryer on the back deck. That somehow seems like cheating. :-) After hearing my brother-in-law (a Vermonter) explain it a few years ago it sounded like a stoic exercise in sleep deprivation and continuous wood-fire feeding.

That's the book we have. I haven't read it yet, just gave it a quick skim a few days ago to get the general idea. I was looking at the 55-gallon drum burner in there, as there just happens to be one of those sitting out back that we're not using for anything. On the other hand I like the idea of not putting too much work into it the first year until after we prove we are actually going to get some results out of it.

I really should do a bigger tree survey to see if there are any more of these guys around. We have a hundred acres of trees, but probably not so many of the right kind for this purpose. If we find more of them farther out from the house we then have to figure out how to transport the sap. If it's near a trail then we can grab it by snowmobile.

Heh. I actually wrote that before reading the Tuesday entry in your log about the guys on snowmobiles at Trapps...

I've been using an old Coleman multi-fuel stove with a converter to run off a 20 lb propane tank set up on the deck. Use a couple of large pots (old 20 qt pressure cooker pot and a 16 qt blue enamel pot).
Early in the boiling, turn it on in the morning, top off when I stop home at lunch, then monitor throughout the evening. Turn it off before I go to bed. Rig up a tarp over it if snow or rain in the forecast. Have to watch it a lot closer when it gets closer to ready, lost more than one batch to boiling it dry - 16 qt pot full of blackened dry foam - a real bitch to clean out.

I tap only 6 trees right around the house, get the majority from 2 sugar maples beside the garage. Enough to get a gallon or 2 of syrup every year, keep some and give the rest away to family and friends.

Well worth the effort - kids love it.

Yes, as the boiling point starts to rise, you've got to watch closely. I burned one pot load to char, and foamed another over the rim, but caught it before it burned. Once burned, the pot is definitely a mess. Even if you get the chunks off, the pot still has black sugar marks forever.

So the point then of using a wood fire is to keep someone around feeding the fire so they'll also be keeping an eye on the sap? :-)

The other day I found several more sugar maples way out back, as I was skiing slowly along the trails scanning the woods for them. The thing I'm concerned about is that we live in a forest, and as such all trees are just long poles with a few leaf-bearing branches way up at the top. No stately shade-trees like you might find lining the driveway of an old farmhouse. I have no experience at this yet, but given the trees I have to work with I'm imagining I'm not going to get a large amount of sap per tree, and thus need to hunt down as many of them as I can find just to make it worth the effort.

You're right, the best trees are along the roads and fields and get plenty of sun. However, I run through a lot of rural forest and have to watch out for sap lines strung between the trees. Many of the sugarbushes are just forest where the maples are tapped. We probably have a higher density of sugar maples, so the trees are typically every 20' or so.

Even with your shaded trees you'll get a reasonable sap run, if the weather is right. This year my trees have been running solid for 2 weeks, and Ed has yet to get anything. He's 20 miles away, but considerably higher elevation. If the temp suddenly runs up to the 60's, he may end with a limited run.

Try a few trees and see how much sap you collect. Start small and gear it up

Heh, between you guys' encouragement and the weather I was inspired to try it now rather than wait until next year like I was planning...

So on Wednesday it was cold overnight and sunny in the morning with a high 40's forecast so I figured why not give it a try? Of course I had nothing on hand to work with yet. Stopped by Agway after dropping the kids at school and got a length of 1/2" wooden dowel. Figured out that "tapered dowel" must mean I have to whittle it down at one end to fit it into a 3/8" hole, and proceeded to make a handful of taps. I don't have a drill-press, so drilling the holes was a bit of an adventure. I figured it really only has to go through the middle at the exposed end, which turned out (eventually) to be correct.

Tapped 4 trees and hung collection bottles on them. I didn't really have a good way of making them stay put on the taps since my taps didn't have any kind of lip like the commercial ones. I tried notching them and that seemed to sort of work. Nothing was coming out however, so I just left them and came back occasionally to check on things. One thing that bothered me at the time was when I looked up at the tree tops I could see buds, and they looked pretty red. "Maybe these are really red maples" says I. (Seriously, I know from looking around that we have a lot of different maples here, but I'd never learned how to identify the different ones, and at this time of year bark is pretty much all we have to go by.)

So when everyone else gets home we revisit the sugar maple identification question and everyone assures me that those are the right ones. Those are the same ones that friend's grandfather uses and he's been doing this for years and years.

Fast forward a couple of days and I finally notice that the tree at a neighbor's house down the road with the jugs hanging on it does NOT look like the ones I was told to use. Looking once more at the tree on the cover of Backyard Sugarin' and even I can plainly see that it looks very much like neighbor's tree and not at all like our selected trees. I argue my case once more and look around for trees that look more like that. I don't see any. Rats.

So this morning after a late breakfast I go out skiing with my daughter and stop dead in my tracks. 100 yards from the house, there's a tree that looks like the cover model on the book! It's a bright sunny warmish day, so after we ski for a while I go get the drill and the last tap I made on Wednesday that never got used. Before I can even get the drill bit out of the tree the sap is running out. Woohoo, I feel like Jed Clampett! After everyone else comes by to see this wonder, we eventually discover that the gallon milk jug thing is losing more than it's collecting and I'm seriously wondering what it's going to do when it starts getting heavy. We do better with a 1 liter soft drink bottle, but even that is not very reliable, plus the sap is running so fast that we have to keep checking it to empty it into the larger jug.

By now I've found a few more of the correct trees nearby and want to tap them, too, but we need to improve our collection system or else it's not worth it. We gather up a bunch of 5 gallon buckets and head back to Agway for plastic tubing. We find the 5/8 O.D. tubing with 1/2" I.D. fits snugly enough over the 1/2 dowel, but it's $0.89/foot. Too much. Think. Ok, short piece of 5/8, followed by longer length of 1/2" O.D. tubing pushed inside the 5/8". 1/2" is only $0.39/foot. I figure about 3' per tap and buy 15' of 1/2" plus a couple feet of 5/8".

So now we tap the next tree, a big 3-trunk thing with two trunks big enough for tapping. Run tubing from both taps into a 5-gal bucket. Works pretty well except the 1/2' tubing isn't quite tight enough inside the 5/8" to prevent leaks. A couple wraps of duct tape between the layers of tubing cures that problem! By now it's dinner time and we go back and put a 5-gal bucket on the 1st tree now that we have a working system figured out.

With things working well we go out to run some more errands. Home at dusk and we have nearly a gallon in each bucket already, even though the one with two taps has only been going for a couple hours! I have two more trees I want to tap and I was thinking wait until morning, but then I realize the taps I have are still running as fast as during the daytime. So we tap the last two trees by headlamp. Very little coming out of them, but they're also the least healthy looking of the lot.

So 2 gallons so far from 3 taps, one of which was put in around noon and the other two around 5 PM. Next step: figure out how we're going to filter and boil this stuff!

Good start! When you drill the hole and sap comes gushing out, it never ceases to amaze me.

I used to cut a hole near the top of the plastic jug and slip that tightly over the tap. Then I tied the jug to the tree with a line around the trunk. Running tube to the ground is easier and that's what I do now. Several taps feed into one 2-1/2 gal water jug and others into larger 4 and 5 gal jugs. So far this year I've collected 120 gal of sap from the 14 taps, by far the most ever.

For filtering, you can use a large paper coffee filter inside a pasta strainer. I don't bother filtering until the sap is partially boiled down. That way you're filtering less liquid. I usually will do it again just before the final finish boil. But if you wait until after it's done, the syrup may be too thick to pass through the filter.

So apparently the "rules" about when sap runs are more approximations than rules. I have roughly 12 gallons collected so far, which I think means the sap ran all night the last two nights. It didn't go below freezing last night. Today is very cloudy and this morning we had showers and even some thunderstorms, but it's low 40's and the sap keeps on running. Which means I'm running out of buckets and have just started boiling. Using an old Coleman propane camp stove hooked to a 20 lb propane tank out on the deck. Because that's what I had laying around. Thanks, Jim, for the idea! Obviously we will want to collect more buckets between now and next year. Plenty of time for that later.

So my next conundrum is whether to be concerned about rain water getting into the sap. I just brought in a bucket with 3 gallons in it that is obviously discolored by rain water from the storm this morning. I think it must have run down the trunk of the tree and then followed the outside of the sap tube into the bucket. Judging from when I last checked this bucket this morning, probably at least 2 gallons or more of this is sap. The discoloration looks a bit like what I've seen in wilderness river water after a rain storm when collecting drinking water. The locals said it was tannin and while it didn't look good, was harmless. Drinking water filter did not remove the discoloration then. Have you seen this happen and is it safe to mix in with the rest of the sap? I'm thinking it's safe since the extra water will boil off and the boiling will kill anything that might be living in it, but will it make any difference to the final product? I don't recall the book addressing this issue.

Tannin is why you age chardonnay in oak barrels. It gives wine some of the bite you may find desirable. You can let us know whether it does the same to maple syrup. I would try to keep out the water just so you have to boil it less.

You'll know the sap run is over when it stops coming out the taps. You've built up some pressure, so it will keep going for a little while in warm weather. Once it stops, you'll need a cold night in the 20's to get going again. If it doesn't, or if the buds start to break, then you're done for the year. Of course, the Canadians tap again in the fall, but that's not real maple syrup.

We'll call this one a learning experience. Because of the way the multiple trunks on that tree are shaped where they come together, the spots where I tapped it are, in hind site, right where the most rain water will come down the trunks. It was of course bright and sunny when I tapped it...

I went back out and put some duct tape around the tubing where it enters the bucket lid this afternoon when it was dry. Another storm came through this evening and it looks like another is still coming, so will see tomorrow how well that worked.

It's supposed to go down into 20's again tomorrow night, so hopefully not done quite yet, but now that I'm out of spare buckets I have to make sure to boil off at least as much per day as I bring in. It's going to be more work hauling 5-gal buckets to the house if the sap run outlasts the snow. So far I'm hauling them on skis, which isn't so bad as long as I don't let them fill to more than about 3 or 4 gallons before grabbing them.

What triggers the budding? High temps? Can you more or less guess from the weather when it will happen, or do you just watch the tree tops? Is the bud-y sap obvious when it happens? Can you tell by tasting it? I'm just curious how I'll know bad sap from good sap and not to put it in with the rest of the batch and ruin it.

If possible, boil down the early sap separately from what comes later. The first syrup will be light and clear (grade A fancy), later has more enzymes and other stuff and ends up Dark Amber. I like the dark syrup; it's like the peat taste of single malt scotch. The change in color and taste is interesting; they're both good.

I'd also keep the rain water sap separate, as it might not end up good. With the end of the season, the sap flow slows way down and turns a yucky yellow and then just stops. I think it will be obvious to you.

So when you say "early sap", does that refer to early in the sugaring season? Or to the first sap taken from the tree, regardless of when in the season it happens to be?

Finished off our first batch today. Ended up being 1.25 quarts. Of course everyone was quite excited about it. We have enough sap collected to do that much again and it's still coming, so maybe we'll get a whole gallon before we're done. Having gone through the entire process now once I feel a bit more at ease about it all, and of course have plenty more things I feel I should learn.

I think the rain water sap is ok. Boiled it most of the way down today by itself and it tastes fine and looks pretty much like the first batch.

It's interesting to see how everything changes with the weather. I have a couple trees that are producing very little. What was coming out was yellow, so I tossed it. Then after a freeze/thaw they started running clear, though still slow. Also out of that first group of trees by the house that we tapped last weekend and weren't producing anything, two of them suddenly started running after we stopped checking them and working with the second group. My son went by and found their bottles full and running over a couple days ago. So now I have 10 taps out altogether, 6 of which are running well, 3 running slowly, and 1 not doing anything. I'm guessing the end is probably near, with forecast for 60 on Sunday and 70 on Monday.

I definitely want to thank you for all the help and encouragement. If not, in particular, for you comment about Ed being at altitude and not having started yet, we would have waited until next year. I don't know what altitude Ed is at, but we're "at altitude" for this area and that gave me reason to think it might still be worth a shot. We still have snow and people skiing up here, while a few miles away and several hundred feet lower I see green lawns.

Early means earlier in the season. The next batch you boil will likely come out darker and have a heavier flavor. With temps here in the 70's on Sunday/Monday, that will be it for us, too. Right now it's still great, as while the day high gets to the 50's, last night it dropped to 20.

Pretty close to the end for me. Bottled a gallon last weekend, finishing off a batch today, maybe 3 quarts, with another quart or two still in the early stages from the run over the last couple of days.

For me, end of the seaon has been pretty obvious - trees just stop producing. Will probably pull my taps tomorrow or Monday, with higher temps in the days and forecast not showing below freezing going forward, it will taper off to nothing.

Am going to try boiling some down to sugar with this batch - get it up to about 260F, let it cool to 200, then keep stirring and it will granulate as it cools further. Will see how that goes.

Ken - what's your formula for "Maple Magic"? Maple sugar reconstituted in water??

Well, to spill the secret, it's just straight syrup. Drink it right from the jar.

Interesting to hear how the sugar comes out. Once the temp gets over 221F it really wants to foam over and char. Let us know whether you're successful.

I'm declaring success on sugaring.

Started out in a smaller pot, but it was foaming a lot. Over the heat, pull it off/up, stirring all the while, repeat. Foamed over once and Beth demanded I put it into a larger pot. She was right, of course. Stilled foamed, but was more spread out and manageable and kept it in the pot.

Once it got above 235F went rather quickly, not a lot of moistue left in it at that point to get out.
Once to 260F, took it off heat and it started foaming again! Stirred quickly, which deflated it and it just started crystalizing. Kept stirring for a couple more minutes, was hardening on the bottom and edges, then turned it out onto a shallow pan lined with wax paper. Quickly breaking up the larger crystals. Not uniform in size, from dust to 1/8" grains.

Beautiful amber color, tastes great! Salvaged the residue in the pot by rinsing in last batch of sap still in process - might finish that off today.

Then had to clean the stove...

Brave soul! (Beth, that is)

The next batch you boil will likely come out darker and have a heavier flavor.

Yep, sure did. Nobody seems to be complaining though! ;-)

The funny thing though is that the sap is coming so fast now that I'm running out of buckets. I thought the warmer weather would put an end to it, but today, eventually making it into the 60's, was probably our biggest day yet. Almost 15 gallons. Going to have to boil through the night just to free up bucket space.

The other problem is that I've been storing the full buckets buried up to their lids in a snowbank with a tarp over top to keep them cold until I boil them. But now the snowbank is gone. So I had to move them to a hole I dug in the big pile where I plowed snow off the driveway. That's the only one left anywhere near the house.

Two other folks in the area I've talked to have both pulled their taps. One told me he's been doing this for 10 years and this was his worst year yet. He's less than a mile from me, but hundreds of feet lower. I also discovered a big operation a few miles away. Was riding my bike on a nice day a few weeks ago and heard a noise coming from a forested gully next to the road. Pulled over and looked down and saw a big sugar house with a huge cloud of steam coming out of it. Running an oil-fired burner. A few days ago I went back by there to take a closer look. He must have 1000 taps at least. His lines go probably half a mile parallel to the road and I couldn't see how far back without leaving the road, which I wasn't eager to do without an invitation.