maple syrup

This year for the first time I am trying to collect maple sap and make syrup.  I bought some minimal equipment to see if it was something that I wanted to do before investing in everything that I would need to make good use of my couple of huge maples that are in my yard.  According to a booklet I purchased to get me started my trees should be able to support three taps each but I bought one to start with and then a second.  I am not sure how long our season will go but so far it has been fun so I am thinking that I will expand my operation for next year.

Collecting sap is dependent on the right weather conditions and this year I have had my sap stop running when it got too cold during the day and too warm at night.  There is a formula for cool nights and warm days that causes the sap to run.  Right now it is too warm so there has been no sap for  a couple of days but there is a cooler period coming so I am not giving up yet.  In the meantime I am cooking up the sap that I have.  It takes a lot of sap to make a little bit of syrup.  My first attempt, the first sap that I collected before the cool spell, cooked up to make perhaps a cup of syrup.  It tasted great.

I started cooking some of the second batch of sap and discovered that it requires close supervision at the end and my syrup ended up being maple brittle.  Still tasty, but it won't work on waffles.  My set up for evaporating the water from the sap is fine for a small batch but to make syrup on a larger scale I might need to consider a way to cook larger batches.

sap bucket

first syrup

maple brittle

Sharing at BNOTP here.