Lancelot Acres

Making Maple Syrup - step-by-step pictures

Making Maple Syrup (step-by-step pictures)

Well, we did it.  We made maple syrup for the first time.  We are pretty impulsive about such things and it's always a learning experience.  We get better with the second and third tries though.  LOL

I thought it would be fun to try and make our own syrup.  I had noticed some local trees were tapped, so I mentioned to DH that we should try and tap some trees at my parent's house.  We don't have many maples on our 10 acres, but my parent's had several in their yard.

I suggested this on the day before Easter, so off we went and picked up about $50 worth of supplies (12 taps, 6 'y' connections, 50 ft of tubing, a drill bit (we already had the manual drill), a maple candy mold (LOL) and 5 buckets (5 gallon ones w/ lids). 

We spent about 45 minutes on Easter Sunday tapping 5 maples at my parent's house.  3 hours later we dumped the buckets and already had almost a 5 gallon bucket full!  My DH rolled his eyes and said we are NOT set up for this.  LOL.

I was just expecting a bucket or two of sap and then just attempting to make a serving of syrup.  It takes 10 gallons (2 of the 5 gallon buckets) to make about a quart of syrup.  I wasn't expecting even that much since the season was already half over.  We have now had about 10 buckets of sap and it's still running, though slowing down a bit.

Here is our adventure in step-by-step pictures:

Tapping the trees:

Our first boiling set-up, before we realized we had sap coming out our ears and that this would get expensive fast.  LOL (This is in our woodshed/barn and that's our cat Socks).

This is our second boiling set-up.  Lance made an outdoor fire with cinder blocks on 3 sides and a grate across the top.  We just set the pots on top of the grate and kept the fire going all day.  It worked great and was very little work other than adding wood periodically.  It took about 6-8 hours to boil down a pot of sap.  A pot holds about 4-5 gallons of sap. 

Once the sap boiled down to about 2 quarts of liquid, then we brought it in the house and finished it on the stove.  The end is when you have to watch it closely and remove it from the burner when it reaches about 218 degrees.  At 220+ it starts to turn to candy (too thick).

Filters were the only thing we had a problem with.  We used coffee filters which worked fine for filtering the syrup, but took over an hour for the syrup to filter through, drip by drip.  We'll have to purchase wool ones to use next year I think, as we hope to make enough syrup to last us a whole year.

This is after it cooled.  This was the first batch and I cooked it too long.  It's hard like rock candy but tastes good.  LOL.  The second batch turned out really good though, it's the perfect consistency and tastes really good too.

We still have sap to boil down and the trees are still dripping but I don't think we'll get to it as we've had a few things come up unexpectedly.  Now we know we can do it, it's not that hard, and not expensive at all.  We look forward to doing it again next year and we'll be better prepared so it should go smoothly :)

Sap

{ 09:32, 2008-Apr-21 } { Posted by Belle }

My family made maple syrup for the first time this year. We LOVE it! We will never go back to the store stuff again!
Our sap season is over now. Warm weather has come and the sap has stopped dripping.

Your sap boiling set-up looks great!

Belle