I wanted to record some of the details of our maple syrup making at Pure Water Hollow, especially for any of our generations who may live here in the future and may want (or need) to process their own maple syrup/sugar.
I am amazed that it took us living here this long to realize that we have a very impressive “sugar bush” up at the head of the hollow. There are dozens of large maple trees in close proximity to each other where we used to call the “turn around spot”, or “the bowl”. Now we will call it the “sugar bush” or the “sugar bowl”! I’m not sure how many are truly sugar maple trees, but my guess would be 20 or more tapping size.
I don’t know if anyone planted the maples up there purposely or if they are just products of the forest, but it does seem that they were intentionally left here when the property was last logged in the 80s. We are grateful to whoever had such foresight in the past. Since maple trees grow so slowly, it would appear that some of our trees are well over 100 years old. I have read that it takes between 30 and 50 years for the trees to grow big enough to be good for tapping!
Once the trees were identified, we started reading up on the process. Carla Emery has a few good pages in The Encyclopedia of Country Living about making maple syrup. (Is there anything that she did not touch on?) There are also several great resources on the web. I especially liked the ones from Ohio State University and University of Cincinnati since they are not very much farther north than we are here. (I couldn’t get the pictures to load on the one from UC but it was still good info.)We also used the one from the University of Maine and a site from Massachusetts.
We found several places online that sell spouts for tapping, but we decided to order from our old friend, Lehman’s. They cost $1.80 a piece there if you buy them in quantities of 10. Ebay had some for less, but I didn’t feel very comfortable with the looks of any of those, and there were many used ones for sale, but I decided I would rather go with the new.
Here is a picture of some of the spouts with the hooks attached:
We would like to try to make some wooden spouts some day. I have read that elderberry stems are easy to carve and hollow out for spouts and we have many elderberry trees growing around Pure Water Hollow. Maybe some year in the future we will see if we can make maple syrup using all wooden spouts, hand drills, and wood fires, with no modern conveniences, just for fun!
We also purchased an iron spout driver to use to gently tap the spouts into the tap hole. I can’t imagine not using this tool, even though I've read that it is not necessary. I would be afraid of messing up the spout if I just tried to hammer it in without the driver. This item was expensive at Lehman’s, but averaged out if we had to spend extra shipping to just buy it alone from another source. We bought it from Lehman’s for $12.95 but I saw the same thing for $6.95 other places.
It is nicer to have a small hammer to tap the spouts into the hole you drill instead of using a rock. I used this one that had belonged to my dad:
These spouts go with a 7/16” drill bit that I did not own. I bought an inexpensive one (Hitachi) at Lowe’s for about $7.00 that worked wonderfully. I also bought an expensive one for $14.00 (Stanley) just to compare and have an extra. I could not tell that the expensive one worked any better. Maybe it will last for many more years? If we only drill 10 or 20 holes with it a year, I would imagine that both bits will last for decades or longer!
We drilled the holes into the trees only about 2 1/2” deep, but we did not measure. We just stuck the drill in and pulled it out and noted how far the wood was sticking on the bit. If it looked like it was less than 2” we stuck it back in a little farther.
Here are the drills we used with the drill bits:
The hand drill belonged to my grandfather and still works well. I am thankful to have it. It, however, was amazingly harder to use than the portable power drill. It really took a good effort to drill a hole. We drilled one hole with the old-fashioned hand drill, just to know that we can do it, but then we drilled all the others with the power drill. The power drill only took about 2 seconds to drill each hole. Very little force was needed and it was extremely easy to use with the trees. (We are really spoiled today in the 21st century, aren’t we?)
You can collect the sap in anything, really. I know the old timers used metal pails and before that, wooden ones. I looked at buying some used metal pails online, but they were so expensive and most that I found looked like they would have rust spots in them. I did not want to use something that would compromise the syrup, even if it were old-fashioned.
I decided to buy nice, new, plastic buckets at Lowe’s. They sell clear 3.5-gallon buckets that can have a lid snap on them for under $4.00 each. If you want a lid you have to buy them separate. (The same lids are cheaper at Wal-Mart than Lowe’s for $1.24 each I think.) I guess I put about $50.00 into buying the 10 buckets and lids we used, but I did not buy them all at one time.
So that’s all the equipment you need to tap your sugar maples: a drill with a 7/16” bit, a spout for each hole you drill, a small hammer and a spout driver to tap the spout firmly into the hole, and buckets of some kind to collect the sap.
We tapped the trees when the flow was on and sap began gushing out of each hole before we could even get the spouts in! It was sunny and warming up quickly at 9:30 Saturday morning. The night before was another freezing night about 20 degrees. These are the perfect conditions for tapping. I know they tap their trees in March or April up north, but I figured that here in Kentucky, we only have about a month until we start having everyday spring weather, so now was a good time. I do think that there will be some other good days in February that the trees could still be tapped here at our location. We just need to have the good freezes at night followed by sunny, warm daytime temperatures.
This may be a good place to note that the sap flow stopped sometime overnight Sunday. Friday night was 20 degrees, Saturday got up in the mid 40s, Saturday night was back in the 20s with a heavy frost, and Sunday got up into the 60s! We collected about 35-40 gallons of sap during Saturday and Sunday from the 10 taps and then Sunday night it stayed in the upper 40s. Monday we had a nice day in the mid 60s again. When Matthew went up in the afternoon to check on the buckets, there was almost no more sap in them than what he had left Sunday (when his transporting buckets were full), and the sap did not flow any more today.
We had read that the sap was supposed to stop when the temperatures stay warm for a prolonged time or when they stay cold for a prolonged time, and I guess that highs in the 60s and lows in the 40s was too warm. I think the sap will flow again the next time we have a night in the 20s followed by the day in the 40s. (We may not collect anymore sap, though. Even though it was only for a couple of days, the family is getting tired of the intense schedule. We will see how everyone in the family feels at that time, but it has been some long work to get the syrup out of the sap.)
We had our first few gallons of sap before noon on Saturday. I had read that it takes 40 or 50 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. Using the 40:1 ratio we figured that it would take 2.5 gallons of sap to fill a half-pint mason jar (8 ounces). After we boiled that down and it only made about 6 ounces, we increased up to the 50:1 ratio. This meant that we would need 3 gallons of sap to make 1 half-pint, and this is what we have used for the rest of the batches. Sometimes it has made a bit more than 8 ounces, but it seems to be pretty close.
I also had purchased a $4.95 candy thermometer to use in this experiment because I kept reading that the syrup should boil at 7 degrees hotter than the first sap. You should be able to note the exact temperature that water, or the first sap, boils at and then keep adding more sap as the water is steamed away. Theoretically, when the boiling temperature got 7 degrees hotter, we would know that we now have maple syrup.
This did not work for us, I guess because the thermometer was not marked off in that precise of increments. I could not really tell what the exact temperature was. I was a bit surprised that water boils here in our location somewhere between 200 degrees and 205 degrees. For some reason I thought that 212 degrees was an official constant boiling temperature of water no matter where you are. (So much for public education, even though I went to a good school. Or maybe that shows that I do not do much cooking?)
Anyway, we decided to use the ratio approach and boil down the sap in “batches”. We filled up our 21-quart stockpots with 3 gallons of sap, filtered through a couple layers of cheesecloth, and started them boiling. We found that our hottest heat source is the electric range in the kitchen. Our propane grill and Coleman camp stove had served the purpose, but took a long time. The day got dark on us up at our “sugar camp” and we still had plenty of sap to boil.
We stayed up there for quite a while Saturday night, boiling down the sap. Matthew made a nice campfire and we had supper under the bright stars. The clear winter sky was breathtaking.
It is still winter, however, and as I wrote earlier, it was dipping back into the 20s on this evening. Even with the fire and the stoves, we decided to move the operation to our nice warm kitchen. (I did have a dream after I went to bed that I was still up at the sugar camp sleeping on a bed of leaves. I was calling down to the house on our 2-way radios that I was going to sleep up there while waiting for the next batch of syrup to be made. Funny how my subconscious brain works at times during sleep!)
I had read in many places not to boil the sap in doors. At least one source said that all the steam would coat everything in the house with a sticky residue. After letting many gallons of sap boil on our kitchen range, I would now say the sticky residue part is a myth. After thinking about it, it doesn’t make sense that the steam would be sticky since the only thing that is boiling away in the steam is the water content. The tree sap is 98% water and only 2% sugar. About 2/3 of the water needs to be taken out. The remaining solution would be 66-67% sugar and would now be syrup. The only thing that is evaporated into the air is all that water. (Lisa later disagreed with this point. She says that we did mess up the kitchen with stickiness. I guess I didn't notice since I wasn't the one who cleaned it up!)
The only problem we had boiling all that water in-doors was the humidity. Most of the cabinets in the kitchen had moisture droplets form on them, and sometimes it was quite heavy. In some ways the humidity was not completely a problem here, however. We heat the house with propane so we usually have air that is too dry. The added moisture to the air did us some good, I think. We did have a fan on and cracked open a window and the kitchen door from time to time to ventilate out the steam.
Some day, I would like to have plenty of wood cut up to use in our wood stove that we could use outside, or even build something that would resemble the old-time sugar camps. It does make sense why folks who operate large operations build a regular “sugar house” or “sugar shack” to do all this boiling in and to also be warm while doing it in the winter. We have the space to build such a structure, and the shack could double as a hunting cabin. Hmmm…..
So we have three gallons of maple tree sap in one large stockpot. It takes about an hour to bring this quantity to just a simmering boil. I stir the pot every now and then so I feel like I am doing something. Another 2 or 3 hours pass before there is a real noticeable difference in the quantity, and I have felt good stirring the pot and watching the bubbles during this time. (If you stir it in real fast circles, you can make the middle boil straight up like a small fountain. Pretty cool!)
At this point it has evaporated enough to be moved into a 3 quart sauce pan, and we have to start watching it closer, stirring every now and then (partly to feel like I am doing something).
Here is a picture of one of the stockpots boiling:
and here it is in the smaller sauce pan:
The sap tastes like very lightly sweetened water right out of the tree and we enjoyed tasting the solution as it changed after every couple of hours of heating. As time progresses the drink gets sweeter and sweeter. We have thought that it might be nice to stop at a point far before syrup and just enjoy the sap as a very good and sweet drink by itself! I wonder what it would taste like on ice?
After about another hour it has really gotten to be a small amount, maybe 4 or 5 cups, and I like moving the contents to a smaller pot. Now I think stirring is very important to make sure the sugar content doesn’t settle on the bottom and get scorched. We did not have any to scorch, but I can imagine it happening easily. When the pot only has a couple of cups of sap/syrup it starts foaming up vigorously. I figured out that this is when it is almost finished.
We accidentally turned a couple or three batches into maple sugar because we evidently boiled it just a bit too long. We do want to have some maple sugar, so we will come back to those jars and work them some more.
After it has foamed a bit, the contents have boiled down to about 8 ounces and just the right size to pour into a half-pint jar. We used the cheesecloth again to filter any of the “sugar sand” as we pour the very hot syrup into the jar. When we put the flat and the ring on we set the jar upside down to let the syrup help seal the jar, along with the heat. Somewhere I read that maple syrup will keep almost indefinitely if the seal is not broken.
We tried to have 3 “batches” going at all times. As we moved one batch to a smaller pot, we would fill up the large stockpot with another 3 gallons. Originally, I wanted to have 4 and 5 batches going at one time. We could fit two large 21-quart pots on the grill and our grill has another burner on the side, and the camp stove has two burners. What I discovered, however, is when you have all the burners going, none of them are as hot as if only one were burning, and I could barely get anything to boil.
One thing that I was unsure of, was when the sap would flow. Somehow I had gotten it in my mind that the sap could fill up the buckets in the middle of the night. Maybe it can if it does not get below freezing, but our experience this time was that the sap cut off after it got below freezing, and then started flowing again the next morning with the warm temperatures. This was a relief, as I was picturing having to get up in the middle of the freezing night and empty the sap buckets.
Something else I was not sure about, was leaving the half-boiled pots of sap overnight. After it was so late Saturday, we decided to just turn off the range and start it back up Sunday when we were able to pay attention to it. We have read that sap can spoil like milk, but I don’t think ours was affected by leaving it overnight. We tried to keep the other sap that was waiting to be boiled stored outside each night where it was still cool.
To be honest, most of our sap was boiled down on our electric range. Saturday was the only day we made a real “sugar camp” out in the woods. The boiling on Sunday was at the house with the electric range and an electric hot plate that has two burners. Lisa and the children also had them going most of the day yesterday while I was at work and they were doing school and today they are finishing the last batch of sap that we collected.
As you can imagine, we are not necessarily looking for more sap flow days right now, but give it a few more days, and maybe we will be up for it.
I should note the only true negative aspect to this experiment. Obviously, the energy it takes to make a relatively small amount of maple syrup is a factor. I am wondering if we will notice a spike in our electric bill from running the range so much. It is hard, if not impossible, to figure how much this maple syrup has actually cost us to produce. I do think that we could come up with enough wood for a fire and we could do the same thing outside and make maple syrup for free. This would make it much more labor intensive. The saw mills around here gives their slabs away for free and many folks say it is the best wood for heating, so that is an option for stocking up the wood supply.
Another negative might be the time required, but if you think about it, it really takes a lot of time invested for anything worthwhile.
I haven’t showed you any of the finished products yet. Here are some pictures of the jars. We still need to boil down the sap for one or two more jars, and at least one jar’s worth has been eaten in the form of sugar. We will have 12 or 13 half pint jars from the 40 or so gallons of sap, and I think that is pretty good!
This picture may be too dark to see the light amber color:
Here is a good picture comparing one that we boiled too long with one that seems to be perfect.
It has sugar crystallized in it. I think we can heat it back up, stir it quite a bit and pour it into sugar cakes. We do want to have regular sugar but we still have to work on that. I think we could crush the contents of the solid jar and pound it into powdered sugar if we want.
Here is a close up of one of the jars (a bit blurry). I wonder what grade it would be?
All in all I am well pleased. Not only have the children learned some great science lessons of the natural world God has created, but we have also discovered another valuable resource that God put here at Pure Water Hollow. It is good to know that natural sugar is available on our own property if it is needed or wanted.
We also know that it can be done very successfully. I think the future will see us perfect the art and I’m sure we will come up with more efficient methods of accomplishing the goal of making maple syrup.
This first attempt has been a sweet success!
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6 comments
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haflinger on February 5, 2008 at 10:12 am
I must say you did a great job in details..I might of missed it but , did you say anything about the different grades? and the ratio 40 to one? Like I said I might of missed it..
Here in Maine they haven't started yet..And many leave there sap lines up year round…
Thanks for sharing..
Blessings haflinger/Sister Brenda
Purewater's reply:It seemed that ours was more on a 50:1 ratio. We started with 40:1 but had to increase it. Maybe the trees here in the south have a slightly lower sugar content? As far as Grading, we have no idea. So far we have graded it as liquid or solid. Either way it is very sweet. This was our first attempt at sugaring. We are not planning on selling anything, just using it for ourselves.
Edited by Purewater on Tuesday, February 5, 2008 at 10:44 AM
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Karen on February 5, 2008 at 11:07 am
Very well done. I've always been curious about this topic. Wow, a stack of pancakes with some of that dark syrup would be good right now.
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LittleHouse on February 5, 2008 at 12:47 pm
It looks like you all had a lot of fun! It's nice to families doing fun things together:)
I hope you enjoy a big stack of pancakes!!!
Ma
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Belle on February 5, 2008 at 2:27 pm
This has been educational and interesting. Thank you very much for sharing.
You have done much more than create maple syrup, you have created a memory that will live on for genterations. Your children most likely will talk of this time to their children and grandchildren and on and on.
We are going to order our spouts today. I looked a the ones Lehmans had just last week. It was exciting to see your post about this since we have been talking about doing it too.I hate the freezing nights, but now I want them back so that we can give syrup making a try.
maa's mom
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sheryl on February 5, 2008 at 3:10 pm
thanks for sharing this with us. I enjoyed reading it. I will be down Saturday for pancakes. LOL Just kidding. I would love to be able to do something like this. We have several maple trees here on the farm. What color does the sugar maple tree leaves turn in the fall? sheryl
Purewater's reply:The leaves are orange/red in the fall, but ours have not been overly vibrant theses past few years. More of dull orange.
Edited by Purewater on Wednesday, February 6, 2008 at 9:32 AM
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Mom on February 6, 2008 at 7:28 pm
I ordered our spouts and a spout driver from Lehmans, yesterday. Thanks to you I ordered the spout driver. I did not see it in the cataloug with the spouts, so I knew nothing about a spout driver. We are getting colder weather again so maybe we will get to do some sap collecting too. My husband is going to put all the spouts in for us, but he does not know one tree from another. I will go along to point them out to him. We got our buckets two weeks ago at the Dollar Tree for a dollar each. They are 12 qt buckets with a handel. If you need more buckets and you have a Dollar Tree near you, you might want to check them out.
I am so ready to give it a try. Thanks for all the valuable information that you have shared here.
I will let you know how we do.
maa's mom
