Collect the sap in a big container.

Set the fire and get your wood inside the saphouse (you don’t want to open your doors too much during the boil).

This is our rig:

Wood goes in the doors at the  front and the fire roars the whole length of the arch, heating the sap in the pans. Smoke roars out the stack at the back.

The boiling process is hard to describe but it’s actually pretty simple.  It looks like a load of bubbles if you don’t know what you’re looking at, so here’s a handy diagram:

Sap is 2% sugar, so 98% , which is mostly water, needs to be boiled off to make maple syrup.

Water boils at 212F (100C)  but syrup boils higher, at 218 (103.33C), so you want to boil off all the water so all that’s left is syrup.

Sap comes in at the back, next to the stack and is brought down a pipe to the front. It moves through the pans, warming and becoming more concentrated as it goes.

By the time it gets to the front pans it’s pretty concentrated. The front pans are shallower and hotter and liquid boils off quicker here than in the back. It moves through the front pans and finally reaches 218F (103.33C) – syrup!

Boiling off the water  can get pretty  exciting. The back pans, mid boil.

Feeding the fire. Every five minutes or so, for hours. Try to keep the doors open for less than 15 seconds. Sometimes the doors go bright red. We’ve gotten the temperature up to 950F (510C)

The front pans. You can see the gradient here. Sap is coming in from the right and hardly boiling at all. As it moves across the  pans, it boils higher and higher. By the time it gets to the draw off point (top left), the bubbles have gotten bigger, the colour darker and the liquid is a lot denser, so the bubbles are popping, not bursting.

Watch the bubbles, the thermometer and the gallon container.

Syrup!

To make these:

In the meantime, here’s some eating and drinking in the woods…

In answer to your question, Cheyenne, sap is DELICIOUS. It’s about 2% sugar, so it’s ever so lightly sweet and makes a very refreshing drink when you’re out in the sugarbush. We drink loads of it. (It’s also a very good way of encouraging children to get involved. Free sweet stuff!).

“Late difficulties in the sugar trade  have excited attention to our sugar trees, and it seems fully believed by judicious persons, that we cannot supply our own demand, but make for exportation.I will send you a sample of it if I can find conveyence without posessing it through the expensive one of the post. What a blessing to subsitiute a sugar which requires only the labour of children, for that which it is said renders the slavery of the blacks necessary”

Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Benjamin Vaughan, June 27th, 1790

(Remove ice first, if there is any).

Empty the pails down the standpipe

The pipes bring it all the way down the mountain to the tank at the back of the saphouse (which doesn’t normally have a person standing in it).

Time to boil!

In the meantime, we had a day of beautiful sunshine, the ice on the trees glittered and suddenly we were living in Narnia.

I don’t mean knock on it. It won’t answer the door and lend you a cup of maple syrup. Like most things agricultural, making maple syrup involves a lot of sweat and quite a lot of violence. My friends who used to live in trees might want to look away now.

First, find a tree.

This is a big, beautiful tree. There aren’t many big trees in ‘our’ sugarbush, so the ones we have are pretty special. This is the ‘Queen Tree’, and she’s the only tree we put three buckets on.

There are various ways to tell if it’s a maple I won’t go into here, but it’s probably worth noting that if it’s standing in a forest surrounded by other maples, it’s still worth checking. Every year I tap an oak or a basswood just because when I’m tapping out I’m cold and tired and fail to look up at the damn tree.

Having found a tree, now you measure your tree:

The Wildfarm sugarers are very conservative about the size of the trees they tap.  12 inch (30cm) diameter – 1 bucket. 18 inch (45cm) – 2 buckets. This is substantially bigger trees and less buckets than most sugaring operations use. If Slater can hug a tree and just get his fingers to touch, it’s a two bucket tree. I’m shorter so I use a piece of string with two knots in it  – first knot, one bucket. Second knot, two buckets.

After you’ve lugged all your buckets up to the sugarbush and selected your trees, go around and casually lob the buckets to the base of the trees you’re going to tap. Add a lid and you’re nearly there.

You want the buckets to be 18-36 inches off the ground (you’re going to be collecting them by hand for weeks, and anything lower or higher will make a heavy bucket difficult to pick off the tree). The only problem with this is there’s so much snow up in the bush right now that I’m sure there’ll be LOADS hanging halfway to mars when it melts.

Drill a hole 1.5 to 2 inches into the tree. You want your hole angling very slightly downwards. If it’s horizontal, or, worse,  slightly up, then it will fill with sap. When the sap is running this is fine, but as soon as the temperature drops below freezing the sap will just sit in the hole. The sap will go a bit off, which isn’t particularly good for your syrup, but nastiness in the hole will cause it to start to heal. You want the sap to drip out and away from the tree as fast as possible. Clean sap, clean wound.

After you make your hole, clean it out with a twig. Then hammer the spout in until you can’t wiggle it any more.

Hang your bucket and repeat 300 times!

Slater and I can put in about 30 taps an hour in ideal conditions – if the buckets are laid out already and if it’s not too cold or wet – numb fingers make the whole thing take longer and, if it’s wet the whole thing can get very uncomfortable. The weather during tapping was just about perfect this year though – sunny, with the days starting out cold and warming up nicely without getting too slushy.

We have more buckets up this year than we’ve ever had – 330, which is about the limit that two people can gather and boil. Some would say more than two people can do, but as we’ve never had this many buckets up before, ask me about that in two weeks.

The buckets are up, the lines to bring the sap down to the saphouse are laid, the firewood is stocked and everything is washed, laid out and ready. All we need now are the trees to start running and we’re off!

Isn’t it pretty?

Ice storms happen like this:

They cause trouble. The weight of the ice

Does this to trees

We were worried about the maples so we took a trip up to the sugarbush. It looks fine though, there’s only a few small branches broken.

It didn’t go above freezing all day and there were 30 mile an hour winds. The forecast is for 9F (-12C) tonight, so we’re hoping the trees can carry the weight without too much damage.

We bring our sap down to the saphouse – which is half a mile down the mountain – by pipelines. At least half of the pipe goes across a very gently sloped field. The last few dregs of sap lie in the little hollows and dips of the pipeline as it goes across the flat bit and, if the pipeline isn’t taken down at the end of every season, it is buried under mounds of snow and frozen earth. The first year I did this we spent 53 hours 40 minutes digging out or repairing pipe (yeah, I kept records..) and I swore it would never happen again.

So now we roll the pipe up every year in April and unroll it in February. It  means that, as it’s on the surface, if anything does freeze in it then it will PROBABLY melt in the morning sunshine. If not, at least we can get to the thing to fix it. Of course, unrolling 500 feet of pipe makes for some interesting tangles…