Day 176: Maple syruping

March 21, 2011

Interesting and fun day over at a nearby neighbour's house today. Matt and my dad had come upon someone else doing some maple syruping, but on a much bigger scale. They told us we could bring over some sap and put it into their syrup finishing tub to boil it down. I went over to check it out with them.

The finishing tub is a bit like a bathtub, a deep, rectangular tub. Underneath, though, it has propane burners. The added surface area is very helpful for burning off all the water in sap. 

We put our sap in there and started heating it up. Patti and Jim were emptying their 122 taps and getting ready to do their syruping for the day. They use a vaporizer for theirs. This machine is so cool. The sap drips down into the first of several chambers where the sap is just boiling like mad. It winds its way down to lower chambers where it's still boiled until it gets hot enough to be syrup (syrup boils at 7 degrees above the boiling point of water). Then you open a tap and out runs some hot, golden syrup. We tasted some and it's just delicious. It has a slightly gritty texture because it's not filtered yet and tastes a lot like maple sugar candy. Pure magic on the tongue.

Julie by the sugar shack

The sugar content in sap varies and after testing ours, it came out right around 2%. Syrup's suger content is 67%. We had a long way to boil that sap even with better equipment. We hung out with Patti and Jim who were super friendly and cool. Patti told us how they used to have a sugar bush (as they refer to their trees) with 700 taps over in Wisconsin!! She said it took 8 hours to collect all the sap and another 10 to boil it down. One season they went through 5 and 1/2 cords of wood in 17 days. It's a very labor and energy intensive process which is why syrup is so expensive.

Eventually, after almost four hours, we decided to take what was left of our sap and head back home. They offered to turn our sap into syrup with their vaporizer for us if we brought over our sap. Very nice of them. The whole experience was really facsinating and fun. It was also great to hang out with such cool people, neighbours even!