The good kind of collection agency

 

Collecting sap - Nothing really technical here. Go in the woods and get the sap. Bring sap back to the truck and bring to the sugar shack. One key thing is to ensure the tank in your truck is tied down, otherwise it will come flying out the back and you will spill 35 gallons on Sandown Rd. Trust me. It takes approximately 40 gallons of sap from a sugar maple to make one gallon of syrup. A red and silver maple are about double that because the sugar content is about half. We tap mostly sugar maples however we do have a few red maples mixed in.

 

Happier times when the tank was in the truck

 

Once back to your farm, you can begin to boil. There are a million methods to perform this step but the process itself is basically the same. We’ll be using a turkey fryer as our example here as most people have one and our first question on the blog was about this method. When I first started making syrup as a lad, we typically just set a pot on the woodstove and waited. One major drawback to this method is that it takes a really, really long time and if both you and your father fall asleep, the syrup will become sugar and then burnt sugar and will wake you both up to a smoky living room. We started out our modern operation with a turkey fryer.Most newer burners have kill switches that need to be pressed every 15 minutes or the gas will be shut off, thus avoiding the above mishap. The other advantage is that you are outside so the copious amounts of moisture that is released into the air, versus the kitchen which can peel wallpaper and ruin drywall. Never a good thing.

This turkey fryer works well if you only have a few taps and really don’t feel like spending $1000 plus on a small evaporator. With a turkey fryer, use the pan and fill it about 2/3 full. Once you light the burner, you leave the lid on until you get a boil going and then remove the lid. Use some sort of visual mark in the pan-mine had a scratch that was fortunately at the correct height and slowly add sap to the pot as it boils down. Once you have put all your sap in, you will boil it down. Through the process, you will notice the contents of the pot getting darker-that means you are getting closer.  Aside from the darkening, you will get a few indicators that you are getting close. The bubbles in the boil will suddenly get very small and very active.

 

 

At this point you want to take a spoon and dip it in. If the syrup drips of like water, you have a while longer to go. If it hangs as a drip at the end that is similar to well, cough syrup, You are set. This is the method most old time syrup makers used and still do today. It takes some practice to master this method so we cheat and use a Hydrometer. I’ll cover that another time.

 

A couple of points about sap. It is similar to milk in the way you should handle it. If you leave sap unprocessed and un-cooled, it will start to get a cloudy residue that looks like boogers. DO NOT use that. It can ruin a whole batch. The best plan is to collect every day and process it that day. We store our sap on the north end of the sugar shack where it never gets any sun. This allows it to stay cool so that we can wait a day or two to boil, but if you are using a turkey fryer, do it right away.
That is it for syrup for now. It's all we'll be doing for the next four weeks so a new topic awaits the next post. Stand by...