Maple sugarin

Nothin beats maple sugarin in the spring!  The picture above is actually step two in a 2 step process.  First, you make a hole in a maple, boxelder, river Burch, black walnut, or hickory tree and collect the sap.  (Maple trees produce the most sap) Then you boil it till it's syrup. You can boil it all up in any pan you want over a fire or on the stove. It really is that simple, here are a few suggestions.

This is a store-bought spile.  It goes in the tree and the sap runs down the spigot.

This is an elderberry spile I made.  The same job, I'll show you how I did this in a bit.

This is a redneck spile.  It's a tube with electric tape.   Make sure your drill bit is almost the same size and walla.

Drill a hole in a maple tree that has a trunk 10 inches wide.  If the tree you have has a monster trunk you can tape more than once without much harm.  The bark grows back shut over the next year.

It's about that deep. Can't remember the bit size, but it's big enough for my spile and that's all that matters.

After that, you should get a bucket to collect your sap.

This tree was at least 4 ft in diameter so I tapped 3 times.  The bucket is on the ground











When you're done boil it!!   You will be boiling 25+ gallons down to 1 gallon of syrup so the more pots the better or you could get one of these.  Some people ask if you add sugar!?  I will politely say NO!!!!!!  Plants make sugar and this sugar is from the trees.  You remove water.  So to be perfectly clear.  There is only one ingredient to make maple syrup.  Tree Sap!

It's a 2x4 ft stainless pan.  The main advantage is I can walk away without worrying about it burning.   I boil syrup all day and sometimes fill the pans all the way, stoke the fire, and come back the next morning.  For maple sugaring, you don't have to watch too much until the last 15 minutes or so.  That's when your syrup could get burned and you'll ruin all your hard work!  Also, you do have to watch for small fires starting near your campfire  In smaller pans, it can be concentrated faster depending on the size.  This big one has so much in it, it takes forever to become really syrupy and by then, I have it in a special pan on the stove. 

Here's that elderberry grew by my barn.  Warning! You better be sure of your plants before you do this! 

Elderberry has hollow pithy stems.

So just cut a piece and poke the pith out.  Taper the ends and put them in your maple.  Works just fine.

If you want to be really lazy you can get a big food-grade barrel for10 bucks off some guy you find on craigslist.  For just a couple big maple trees you can just rest the barrel under them.  However, for most of my trees, I use the barrels as stores for the 5-gallon buckets

If you don't have a barrel that is food grade, you can use any container that is food grade.  Some people use 2-liter pop bottles or 5 gal water jugs etc.

They don't have a removable lid though so you'll have to cut it off and then do this.

It fits right back on, keeps out the rain, ad you've got plenty of places to stick the tubes in. 

Here's a couple of them set up

As I said before, most trees I just use a 5-gallon bucket.  It's a lot more time-efficient.  I then use the blue bins as reservoirs until I have a reasonable amount to boil.  I just set the buckets on the ground and drill the spiles above.

Here's how I hook the tube up to a the spiles

The wood one falls off more frequently, I'm going to have to whittle it down more and I'm sure it will be fine

You just shove the redneck one in the hole.

Any way you do it you just have to get the sap in your bucket and then to the pans.

To boil the sap you want as big as pans as you can get!

Here's my most recent setup.  Big pans on cinder blocks.  

So how do you know when it's done?  First, you will start seeing plates of sugar on top like in this pic.  Also, note that you have to really start watching at this point.  I usually transfer to a smaller pan when I notice it's really strong and sweet.

Here's what it boils like when It's almost done.  It will climb the walls of your finishing pan and it will spill everywhere and make a mess.  Before I used a thermometer, I would just bring it to this point, lower the heat, and boil a minute or two more.  It's also a good point to stop and filter which is optional but recommended.

The minerals in the syrup build up at the end and some call this sugar sand.  You can filter through a variety of fabrics, but you need to do it hot because it's syrup and you have to make sure the fabric lets things flow through well.  This old cloth worked great, don't use some weird plastic fabric.  Wool is traditional.  You can see the crystals building up around the side of my liquid.

To attach my cloth I just use some masking tape below the lip of a big pot.

All filtered

7.1 degrees Farenheight above normal boiling point is syrup.  Close enough for me.

You should hot pack the syrup from boiling into syrup grade jugs, or jars.  That way it's preserved until you open it. 

If you carefully heat it to 255 and then stir it while it cools you will get maple sugar

So there it is.  You collect the sap and boil it.  When it gets really thick it's syrup. Also, do you see that percolator coffee pot?  Yep, that's maple-flavored coffee perkin in there.  You need to try that!

 

To clean up all that campfire and other whatnot.  I recommend milk stone cleaner.  You can also use Vinegar to clean out pans

What about frozen water in your bucket?

Here's some frozen syrup that is in the finishing pan.  Do you think the ice has no sugar in it????

  

Keep the ice! You're throwing out good sap if you chuck it.  The above picture tasted as sweet as ice cream and still froze.