It’s maple syrup time!
Just out of the blue Dwight decided that we were going to tap some maple trees. We thought about tapping them and bringing the sap to a friend who has a large evaporator but it turns out they have more than enough sap of their own so he gave Dwight some buckets and a pail of spigots and away he went.
Our goal is to make a gallon of syrup. I googled "Making Maple Syrup" and educated ourselves.
It's a beautiful sunny day, about -1. I am inside at the moment resting up after stomping a trail around all the maple trees so that Dwights job of tapping and setting the containers underneath is easier. It is amazing how many containers you can find lying around suitable for the job. You see we dont really want to invest much into this except our time.
Today it is supposed to reach -1, it is noon and we have reached the temp and now the sap is flowing on all the south facing taps. It’s quite warm in the sun. Dwight has gone to the trailhead to see if he can find any other containers, I had to go in and lie down for a bit. I have been down and out for a few days with a cold, sore throat and cough.....actually I feel like crap.
We have guests in the cabin at the moment till monday...when they check out we know there will be more containers to be found. Our favorite so far is a one gallon clear water jug complete with handle. There is also a rain barrel with spigot at the cabin which we could use as the collector container that we will keep filling the evaporator with. We are using a very large stainless turkey pan. Now we just have to get another wood stove. I just missed out on the deal of the century. I saw the perfect wood stove listed in Kijiji, large surface area and all he wanted was a case of Bud Light! We do have an extra wood stove but guess what, it is top loading so that won’t work for us.
It’s -1 at the moment and went up to plus 3 today and going down to -14 tonight.
Dwight went to a friends across the lake who has a large recycling container. Dwight remembered from last year that there was a pile of those clear water containers with handles that he wanted to use for sap collectors so he went dumpster diving and came back with about 10 of them.
We ended up getting the small wood stove out of the yurt and Dwight changed the pipe to go out of the back instead of the top so we would have room for the pan to sit, One of the screws was not going to come out so Dwight had to drill it out and retap.
We put the stove in the garage and put the first small batch of sap on to try things out. It been almost 2 hours and it is still not boiling...evaporating but just not fast enough soooo tomorrow I will build a stone fire pit and place the pan right on top, that should do the trick. I told Dwight I would take job of boiling it down and Dwights is to collect it. That works for him....funny how I always end up at the stove. We had a very successful day. Dwight put in 35 taps in 31 trees!!! It's interesting how different trees have different flows. In the picture below I can see eight tapped maple trees. All the trees are just around the house with lots more we could tap.
Look at the picture beside, Dwight is having fun tapping the hydro pole!
We could not believe how much sap we collected on the first day...14 gallons!!!!! Dwight went out with a seven gallon container to collect the sap and brought it back to be dumped in a very large cooler we had which we are using as our sap collector. We are utilizing everything we have. I lined a colander with paper towel to filter the sap and Dwight poured the sap in. The sap came out fast and hard and disintegrated the paper towel so I got a white hand towel, wet it and used that as the filter. You see the sap collects debris that falls off the tree. Dwight says "don't put your hand on the tree above the bucket"
Thank goodness I noticed that the sap was leaking out of the drain on the cooler so I had to go down to our wine cellar, open a bottle of wine just for a cork. I hammered the cork in the drain hole. It worked like a hot dam. We'll take care of the wine tonight.
Actually it’s kind of a neat thing to be doing this at this time of the year when you are in between seasons and there is not much else you can do.
We woke up bright and early and were talking about our day before and our plans for the day before we were even out of bed. Before building the new fire pit the idea was to take the cast iron top off of the wood stove so that there would be direct contact with the fire and the pan. So Dwight was out bright and early fighting to get the cast iron top off the wood stove....he did it.
I put on a grill and covered the corners with tin foil so it would not smoke. It turned out that it did not make much of a difference, a lot of the flames were licking up the chimney pipe, I could not to damp it down. I tried blocking it with an aluminum pie plate but that melted almost right away. Well back to the fire pit idea, a call to the neighbors to see if they had a big square pan we could use as an evaporating pan...Bingo. I could build the fire pit around it.
Before Dwight headed into the bush to do some more logging he dug me out some cinder blocks that were frozen in the ground and then with some bricks left over from the neighbors we were all set. I used everything that I had, cinder blocks on the side and back. I turned the back bottom block on its side so the three holes were exposed to give air to the fire. I lined the front edge with the rest of the bricks and build it so that I could just drop the pan down into it and it was held there by the lip of the pan. I just removed the bricks in the front once in a while to pack it full of wood. It was such a nice day I would take some of the bigger blocks fo wood and split them into smaller pieces for a nice hot fast fire.
The fire pit was set up on the driveway. In no time there was a good fire going and the sap was boiling furiously. Wow this was the answer.
I used a small sauce pan as my dipper and was putting in a scoop of sap about every ten minutes. By the time the day was done (and it was a long one) I had boiled down about 10 - 14 gallons of sap. During that time I would also scoop off some scum that would form on the top with a big steel spoon.
In the meantime Dwight collected another 9 gallons of sap. The temperature had gone down to -14 last night and a high of -4 today but full sun. Tomorrow there is talk of snow/cloudy and tonight -2 so we shall see how much Dwight collects tomorrow after work. I have guests to pick up at the cabin. Thank goodness I can still use the snow mobile to go get them.
The last log that I threw in the fire was a piece of iron wood which burns really hot and it did. I wanted to use the last of the heat that was there so I was boiling down the sap to the stage that it could finish it in the house on the stove. I had to keep adding new sap to keep it at where I wanted without burning or reaching the final stage. When this was finally reached I got another pan and my homemade filter which was lined in a metal sieve and scooped the sap into the sieve and pan, brought it inside and boiled it down till it reached the right consistency. I did not have a thermometer but kept testing it by putting a bit on a cold plate. By 7pm I had 3 jars of syrup, about 6 cups. Man that was a lot of work for 6 cups of syrup. The pan was only 3" deep. I can see that if you want to do this yourself you would want to collect a lot of sap first and get a large evaporator pan or 2 for that matter and get it all over and done in a day or two....hmmm maybe thats what we will do.
Its perfect maple syrup weather for the next week! We have lots of sap collected and 2 new containers that can boil down 3 gallons each so thats 6 gallons all together. Don't forget it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallons of syrup, isnt that crazy! and a lot of boiling! Tomorrow is boiling sap day. Take a look at the new firepit I made complete with chimney for a good draw and to keep the ash away from the sap. I will write a new report tomorrow night.
9:15 am, Okay, got the fire going, filled it full of blocks of kiln dried maple and the pan at the front was in a full rolling boil in 12 minutes, thats 3 gallons of icy cold sap!
There is way too much draft with the chimney I put in, and a lot of wasted heat going up and missing the pan at the back, I am just waiting for the thing to melt down. I tried removing it, too much heat, will wait till the fire dies down. Even the wooden handle that I have set back from the door is smoking. Lots of steam in the air, looks like a real maple syrup operation. It's 9:30 am and a beautiful sunny day at -5 and I already smell like a campfire girl. Poor Dwight is at work sitting at a desk awaiting reports from me but the worst of it is he has a meeting at 2pm and so can't even get home early. He will however be home early enough to collect some more sap. Yesterday after work he collected 11 gallons of sap from the trees. Tomorrow he is taking the day off, he has a yurt platform at the cabin to dismantle and haul back across the lake to a new site before ice breakup.
I took the chimney off and things went much better and boiling away fast.......then I added more wood, this time some regular firewood. There must have still been some moisture in it case it started smoking......hmmmm now what to do. Well I set the chimney on some bricks about an inch away from the opening at the back and propped it up on some bricks, that gave it enough draw to pull the smoke up the chimney......do you think I'm having fun.....dam right!
This is so much more fun when you are feeling better, I've had a cold the past two weeks with a horrible cough that kept me awake. It is now clearing and I can sleep again. Now it looks like its Dwight's turn.
By 3:30 pm, Finally the last of the sap is in the evaporating pan! Now I boil her down till it is close to being finished and then I filter it into another pan and take it inside to finish on the stove. It is cooling down now, there is a north/west wind blowing. Is it beer time yet?
4:45, Its getting chilly out, Im letting the fire die down as it is getting close with the syrup. Watching sap boil down is kind of like watching a fire, you dont really feel the warmth of the fire as it is all directed to the bottom of those pans. I will let is simmer for a while while I start supper. I think I will get a spagetti sauce going in the meantime. Dwight is off to the cabin to do some work.
The way it goes with a small back yard operation is that if you sell it, it would be $500 a gallon...no kidding!!!! Today I made 1/2 gallon. But that is not what this is about. There is something about making your own maple syrup from your land, that is so satisfiing.099999reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee68900666666666666666668y66swwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwt`1
whoops, excuse that last bit, when I am outside Simon our 4 month old Siamese likes to practice typing, he just can't spell yet. Remember always save your work cause ya never know when your computer will crash because of some unknown cause.
Anyway back to the syrup. I wish I had taken a picture of the filter after I finished boiling it outside, it was pretty dirty. Next batch.
7pm Woooohooooo, I got just over half a gallon.
Wow, what a long day, we just had to be around every half hour to throw wood on the fire and pour sap in the pans. You see with the last two warm days the sap has really been flowing! Yesterday Dwight brought in 17 gallons and today 15. Three days ago he only got 5 gallons. So boil baby boil, is what we did today.....only after we finished the neighbors dock this morning! I will know tomorrow exactly how much I got in today, over a gallon I think which is leading me to believe the sugar concentration is higher right now.
By saturday we will have enough collected for another boil down and that will be the last because we have loads of syrup to last us the year and it was a really fun process for us....we wont sell it, not worth our while but the satisfaction was well worth it!
I bottled the syrup and we got 17 cups, just over a gallon of maple syrup so the concentration IS higher, that was about 32 gallons of sap.
Well maple syrup time is over for us. You make it till you are sick of it and I'm sick of it now for this season anyway, plus now we have about 3 1/2 gallons of the stuff to last us the year and share with friends.
Dwight and I are now seasoned maple syrup producers and it was a wonderful experience, we learned so much.
At the moment I'm in bliss, I have a 5 month old purring siamese kitten on my chest as I sit on the couch with my laptop on my lap, watching the snowflakes gently falling down and a starling in the throe of song (if thats what you would call it)
Last night we were bringing in the last of the syrup to boil down on the stove and it was dark. The gallon we produced was a darker amber colour. It is very interesting, the first syrup we produced was the lightest and it got progressivly darker, all of it is delicious!
We are putting the syrup in our freezer for longer storage. All the freezer does is make it as thick as molasses and then we just pour out what we need. The consistency goes back to the thinner syrup we are accustomed to.
In the photo below you can see an image of a face in my door. I helped it along with a bit of soot from my glove to show a young friend what I was seeing. It is the great spirit showing approval:)
Did you know...
Pure maple is a natural product with considerable variation in flavors. Like wines, this variation should be sampled and enjoyed. Syrup flavor is affected by soil type, tree genetics, weather conditions during the maple season, time during the season when the sap is collected, and processing technique.
Interesting article on the benifits of maple syrup
See you next year.........