Not much sap then OMG!

     For the past couple days the trees have been slow.  It went to freezing at night, then only low forties during the day.  Sunny, but still cool.  So today at 3 pm I checked jugs.  I didn't have more than two gallons from five trees in 24 hours.  Checked at 5:30 pm - another GALLON!  What's up, trees!  You sure have started flowing.  So I am boiling down what I have on the kitchen stove top and expect tomarrow to be a busy day boiling. I will be tethered to the kitchen.  It's okay, though.  I am reworking a novel that I wrote.
     I am a slow typist - eight words a minute - and spent the past week boiling sap and retyping this novel from hard copy onto my computer so that it could be saved in cyberspace as well as edited in Word.
     Multi-tasking.  If I must be tethered to the kitchen, I might as well be productive.  I'll let you know how it goes with the novel as well as with the syrup.  The novel has nothing to do with making maple syrup.

A Watched Pot Does Indeed Boil!

     When I boil down sap for maple syrup I boil it in my kitchen on my stove top.  I use a heavy weight stainless steel six quart dutch oven.  I set the burner at high till it starts to boil, then turn the heat back just a bit to medium high.  As the water boils off, I add more sap from a large kettle that sets on top of the pellet stove in our kitchen.  This doesn't boil the sap.  It just heats it, takes the chill off of it.
     At first the sap boils rapidly and with pretty big bubbles.  It looks like water boiling.

As the sap boils down, more sugar to water than what it started out as, the bubbles start to get smaller. It also starts to taste sweeter.

     I've never used a candy thermometer when boiling down sap for syrup.  I suppose I could but I can't be bothered with that.  I do this the same as my father did back when I was a kid growing up in upstate New York and he would tap our maple tree to make syrup.  All that sap boiling and steam in the kitchen used to warp our cupboard doors and coat the windows.  I crack a window near the stove so that helps out some.  But be prepared for a steamy kitchen.  Also, don't run off and think you have time to go get involved in something else, something that will take you too far from the kitchen.  You need to keep an eye on the sap as it starts to boil down.
     After I have used up all the sap from the big pot on the pellet stove, the sap on the kitchen stove starts to boil down in earnest.  All this time I have been skimming off the foam that collects near the sides of the pan.  These are minerals, etc.  No reason to keep all that foam there.

     Soon enough the bubbles on the top of the sap start to group up and foam toward the middle of the pot.  Taste it again.  It tastes even sweeter!  Careful you don't burn your tongue.  At this point I watch the pot very carefully.  Sap, as soon as it hits that critical temperature when it turns from watery sweet stuff to syrup, can get away from you really quickly.  I cut the heat back just a bit.  The bubbles go back to bigger.  When they get smaller again, I cut back the heat just a little more.  Taste it again.  I watch how it hangs on the spoon.  If it coats the spoon and drips off slowly in big drops I pronounce it done.  I remove the pot from the burner, let it cool down just enough so I can taste it without burning my tongue, then pour it off into a Mason jar that has been filled with hot water (pour that water out) and sitting on the kitchen counter.
     Next day, same thing and I add the new syrup to the old syrup.  If there is a day when I will not get so much syrup out of what had been gathered and to boil it down to syrup stage would have left too little in the pot to control the boiling, I don't boil it down to syrup, but save the partway stuff off in a jar and add that to the next day's batch.
     This method of pot watching has worked out for me for quite a few years.

Cheap Maple Tree Taps

     I needed a few more taps for the trees down by the creek so went to Coles Hardware Store in town.  I like Coles.  It's like an old fashioned hardware store, great customer service, and you can wander around and take your time to look at things while creating a project in your mind.  When I told the salesclerk what I was doing - tapping maple trees - she brought out some bonafied cast aluminum taps.  Not good for me!  They were $4.99 a piece and I don't want to boil down the $100 gallon of syrup any more than do I want to grow the $200 tomato in the summer.  We looked through plumbing parts and found this:

         The plastic tubing fits over the threaded end and the wedged section fits into a 3/8" hole drilled into the tree.  The tube is directed into a water jug.  If you're going to use a jug make sure it has only had water in it.  Not milk.  Even the slightest bit of fat residue left over from milk could taint your sap.  This arrangment of plumbing part and tube cost less than $2.

         I went down to the creek, drilled the hole in the tree and before I was even done drilling, the sap was flowing.  More boiling tonight!

Sugar Time!

     It's SUGAR TIME!

     This winter in central Pennsylvania has been unseasonably warm.  I wondered if I should have tapped the maple trees in January.  We had many days when the daytime hit over 50 and it went down to freezing at night.  That's prime maple tapping weather.  But I looked on the Internet to see if tapping trees in January was wise.  Normally we don't tap till mid February in Pennsylvania.  I found some information that made me put off tapping the trees.  What I found said that if we would have a cold spell trees tapped too early might start to heal over.  I didn't know if that was true or not.  A lot of stuff on the net is not.  But some is.  So I held off.  Just the same, yesterday our local paper ran an article about a man who said this was a banner year for sugar - maple sugar.  He started tapping in January.  I slapped down the paper and headed outside - drill in hand.  Tapware lined up.

     To tap a tree I use a hand drill with a 1/2" bit.  I drill into the maple tree about 3 feet up from the ground and at a slight upward angle.  This is so that the sap that runs out will run down.  I drill in about two inches.  I have some bonfide metal maple taps and a few plumbers' elbows from the hardware store.  Either type works.  Drill the hole and hammer in the tap. From the hardware store I have some plastic tubing that is then fit over the end of each tap.  This is directed into the empty water jug (a plastic gallon jug) that has been affixed to the tree with a nail and some pipe cleaner.  Twist ties will work but make sure they're sturdy.  A gallon of sap weighs a lot.
     I didn't think sap would run much today.  We had a cold snap.  But sure enough today I gathered up a gallon of sap from two maple trees.  One is a large sugar maple and the other is a red maple.  Any kind of maple tree will deliver sap but some types have more sugar than others. On the other hand, some of the maple trees bud later than others, so I guess it works out even in the end for how much syrup you get.
     The gallon of sap will only make a little bit of syrup.  So here's how I keep up with it.  I boiled the sap on the stove top while cooking dinner.  It took about two hours to boil down o where it had just started to take on a slight amber color.  The bubbles were also smaller than a full boil water bubble.  I let it cool.  Poured it off into a quart Mason jar, put a lid on it and stuck it in the refrigerator.  Tomorrow, I'll do the same.