To make maple syrup, first we need to gather maple sap.
Our supplies:
- 1 Bucket
- Plastic Tubing
- Cordless Drill
- Custom Metal Tap
- Hammer
- Sanitizing Wipes
We clean our supplies before they go into the tree.
Then we drill a hole in the tree for the tap.
The hole needs to be just large enough for our tap and deep enough to reach the flowing sap.
We drive the tap in with a hammer.
Then connect it to the plastic hose.
We place three taps in each tree and connect three hoses from the tap to our collection bucket.
Assembled, our maple tree looks like this. The brick is to keep the bucket from blowing away. When the night time temperatures are cool and the day temperatures are warmer, it encourages the sugar to flow. We check our taps daily and empty our collected sugar into a large barrel.
We bring this back to our sugar shack to be boiled down.
This is pure maple sap. It is pretty watery.
It takes about 80 gallons of maple sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup.
We slowly empty the barrels into our steamer.
This is where the magic happens!
The sap slowly simmers in here for several days to evaporate out the water content.
It is heated by a fire that warms the bottom of the basin that we poured the syrup into.
What a glorious time of year!
When the sap is fully steamed, then we move it to another house where it is carefully finished. Finally it is bottled and ready to sell!
