Making Maple Syrup

First Year Lessons & Observations

Growing up, I rarely ate cereal or eggs for breakfast. Every morning I had pancakes or crepes doused in maple syrup instead. As I grew older, I began taking bottles of syrup on long runs or bike rides because synthetic goo just can't match the sustained sugary energy from syrup. The taste is complex and the mouthfeel is unmatched by corn syrup or molasses. I also really appreciate that this delicacy is rooted here in our backyard of New England.

The process of creating maple syrup has been known to indigenous people for centuries, so when we found our home in October, I was thrilled to see a grove of old-growth sugar maples. At that point I knew that for the first time, we would be able to make our own syrup come spring. As such, this article will describe some lessons and observations from our first sugaring season. 

Setup

The basic equipment for making your own maple syrup is a spile, or a small spout that goes into the tree, a sap collector, most often a bucket, and a way to store and boil the sap. Many people now use 5 gallon plastic buckets with tubing connected to a plastic spile, but I opted to find a used aluminum setup on ebay. For $95, I received 25 spiles and buckets. To store the sap I got a used 275 gallon IBC tote from my friends at Allagash Brewery. This proved to be more than enough space to store the sap, but after sap season it will be invaluable for rain water storage. Finally, to boil the sap I made a basic cinder block oven setup based on this design that used hotel pans to actually boil the liquid. The cinder blocks were $50, the 21 quart hotel pans were $69 (although I only used two of them), and the stove pipe was free. In total, I spent $214 on materials that can be disassembled, used for next year, and repurposed for other projects throughout other seasons. 

A mature sugar maple can be recognized by its gray, vertically-paneled bark

Tapping

Maple sap flows when daytime air temperatures rise above freezing and nighttime temps sink below it. This causes positive pressure within the tree that if given an outlet, will cause sap to flow outward. For our specific microclimate, this meant tapping the trees on February 16th. Although there were many sub-freezing days still to come, research has shown that early tapping does not adversely affect the tree or overall sap flow. 

We tapped 12 sugar maples that were all roughly 16 inches in diameter. All maple trees will produce sap with the telltale maple flavor, but sugar maples have the highest concentration of sugar and therefore require the least boiling. This means that even if you do not have access to a mature sugar maple, there is sure to be a red maple nearby. To tap, we used a 1/2 inch drill bit to drill an angled hole two inches deep on the south side of the tree, three feet off the ground. We gently tapped in the spiles with a rubber mallet and hung the buckets. 

Let iT flow

In the first week, temperatures were just above freezing during the day, so we began to see a small amount of flow. Using 5 gallon buckets, we went tree to tree and collected the sap. The maple grove is located in the woods about 100 yards away and 50 feet below where I built the oven and stored the tote. This meant that every day, sometimes twice a day, we would have to carry anywhere from 1 to 10 gallons of liquid up a hill. In an ideal world, the storage vessel is located next to or below the trees, but our method did serve to make us strong. 

Boiling

Sap has the potential to ferment or even spoil if left untouched for longer than a week, especially if temperatures are high and it is exposed to sunlight. This meant that even though we had only collected 20 gallons of sap after the first week, it was time to boil. 

I was not prepared for this, so by the time I was able to get the first hotel pan of sap boiling, it was 1 PM. That first day I ended up staying out by the fire until 9 PM. And at that point I poured the concentrated sap into a large pot and brought it indoors. The next day I began boiling again, making sure to ventilate the kitchen after my neighbor told me that the first time he made sap, he peeled all the wallpaper off due to the steam. During this time, I tried to filter out any particles by pouring measuring cups of sap through a paper coffee filter. This did not work whatsoever, so I resorted to using a cheesecloth doubled over itself on the end of a funnel. Many passes through fresh cloth eventually got the sap clear, but next year I will likely buy dedicated sap filters. 

Once my kitchen thermometer read 219 degrees, I turned off the heat and let it cool. More high-tech operations use a brix refractometer to measure the sugar concentration to determine when it is finished, but for the first year I found a thermometer to be sufficient. That being said, the first batch I produced was very light in color and mellow in taste. It likely could have been cooked for longer.

In the following weeks, temperatures were consistently above freezing during the day and below it at night. Specific trees were quickly identified as heavy producers, filling up their buckets twice a day, while others barely leaked any sap. Another interesting thing to note was that around March 1st, we began to see dozens of bugs that looked like mosquito-gnats surrounding the spiles and inside the buckets. A quick blow was oftentimes enough to get them to scatter, but plenty of bugs were transferred straight into the tote. This proved to have no effect on the final product, as all bugs were filtered out.

During the boil, we moved more concentrated sap to the back pan and added fresh sap to the front pan

From February 23rd to March 30th, my friends and I performed three more boils, each with significantly more sap. My early riser friend was kind enough to start a fire before 6 AM each time, so we never found ourselves outside until late again. We figured out that if the fire is only burning beneath the outer hotel pan, the air flow will suck the hot gasses out the stovepipe past the back pan causing a more efficient boil. For these boils, we kept the fire going as long as we could to minimize boiling time indoors. 

After bringing the syrup inside and getting it to the finishing temperature, it was now time to store it. We decided to try hot packing the syrup, so that it could be relatively shelf-stable and not take up our entire fridge. Therefore, we sanitized our jars/lids in boiling water and filled the jars to the brim with 190 degree syrup. Then we inverted the jars to sanitize any remaining air spots. 

After all four batches, we totaled 494 oz or 3.85 gallons of syrup, which was more than I thought we would get. But of course, I wanted to figure out how much money we would save by making our syrup year after year. The lowest price per gallon of store bought syrup I have seen is $50, so conservatively, we saved $192 by not buying our syrup. But of course, with the cost of materials, truly we won't break even until the first boil next year. Which, I think, is pretty incredible as we'll be doing this for years to come. The only thing it will cost is our time, and perhaps our aching bodies. 

We're also so excited that the quality of the syrup only improved with each batch, and next year will likely be even better when we purchase dedicated filters. If you are someone with access to maple trees, at least 12 hours of free time once a week, and love maple syrup, then making your own maple is a cost effective and rewarding hobby.

The final product