Sweet, brown, liquid gold

So after putting out the taps, we watched the buckets closely. The first couple of days, the temperature went back down to the upper 30's - not really enough to get the sap flowing very quickly. And then we had more than 16" of snow fall.

In the first 5 days, we collected only a few gallons of sap. 

But then the sun came out. It soared into the mid 40's, and the sap was flowing. Suddenly, I wasn't checking often enough, and we had 17 gallons of sap in two days.  I collected it in food-safe plastic buckets (using clean, empty ail-pails from my cider brewing), nestling it in the leftover snow out on the porch until we were ready to start. The sap can sit out in the cold for several days quite safely, as long as it stays nicely chilled. 

I was ecstatic, and excited to begin the next step. But then I realized we had a different sort of problem. What the hell do you boil seventeen pounds of anything in? 

When I got the idea to start tapping our trees, I sent out a quick email to some other guys in town that I knew would be into it, or had done it before. I didn't know what the heck I was doing. I'm from Georgia. You want to talk BBQ? I'm your man. Making some edible sweetness from the lumber growing in your yard? That sounds like some sort of mystical Pilgrim voo doo. 

One of my Yankee neighbor buddies reassured me. 

"Collect sap. Boil it. It's hard to screw it up"

I pulled out every large canning pot we had in the house. We had three burners going, and steam started to rise, as the watery sap hit a slow boil. Soon I had a wet spot collecting on the ceiling above the stove, and the house began to feel like a sauna. A sweet, maple scented sauna. 

I set up a fan to blow the steam a little better, and get air flowing through the house. Fortunately, we have a large open kitchen area. I don't think I'd do this first part inside again - there are reasons that people did this outside over an open flame. 

It took hours, and we kept consolidating. And collecting. That day was warm again, and we ended up with another 5 gallons by the end of the day, bringing us up to 22 gallons total. 

It takes about 40 gallons of sap to create 1 gallon of syrup - so I was looking at a little more than 8 cups of syrup potential. 

Once we got it down to a couple of gallons of condensed liquid - it was getting more viscous, browning, and definitely sweet and smelling like it was heading where it needed to go. 

The last step is to bring the liquid up to someplace north of 210 degrees - the point where it starts to thicken, and get that syrup texture that you're shooting for. A candy thermometer is your friend. 

 A final filter of the syrup into your clean jars, and this can be put in the freezer for weeks or longer. 

The taste of this fresh, home-collected syrup is amazing. It reminds me of sorghum in a way - richer, earthier, more complex than the syrup bought from the store.  We gave each of the kids a little spoonful, and started planning the pancake breakfasts and french toast and other treats, while at the same time scheming to figure out how we make it last. Collecting and boilng that much sap to get a few precious jars of syrup. This is drizzling syrup, not pouring syrup. 

 Even so, while it took a full day to boil down, I don't think it would really take much more work to do 2 or 3 times the amount of sap, especially with a couple of people to share the watching with. 

This was a bucket-list item for me. But I think this will be a new annual tradition for our family, weather permitting.

But don't expect me to share any. 

You go find your own trees. 

Sugar snow

I remember reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy when I was a kid until the pages were tattered and the cover worn. (Oh come on. That really wasn't a surprise, was it?) 

A few of the particular chapters stuck with me. There was a chapter about cutting ice out of the lake and storing it all summer long in the ice house, insulated with shavings. That seemed awesomely foreign to a boy raised in Georgia. 

But there was also a chapter called "Sugar snow" - that time of year in New England when the days begin to warm up, but the nights still plunge below freezing. The snow is still thick on the ground, but you can feel the first hints of spring in the air. That's when the maples run with sap. 

A few weeks ago during a randomly warmish week in early February (and before the last blizzard), we had a tree guy stop by to check on a few of our older trees, and make sure they weren't at too much risk of dropping major branches or other damage. 

He was talking to my Bride in the driveway when he stopped mid-sentence. You could hear a constant 'drip-drip-drip'. We thought it was snow shifting in the sun. He walked over to a huge, ancient black maple that grows next to our driveway and touched the wet spot leeching down the trunk.  He touched the moisture to his lips. "That's sap," he said. The maples were taking advantage of the warmth and the sap was moving. 

Last week, my Bride reminded me that we were getting on to the time when we could count on some consistent days of the perfect weather. She had seen taps and buckets spring up down on trees down the road towards Concord. I had bought taps last year after the season was over, and they had been sitting in a cup on my desk as a promise of an attempt to try it ourselves this year. So I ran out to the feed store and picked up a few buckets of our own. 

We had scoped out the maple trees on our property over the summer, and ended up tapping five of them. You're looking for something at least 12" in diameter - preferably sugar maple. I did a bit of hasty research into tapping on tapmytrees.com (where else), and figured out where and how to drill the taps into the trees. On some of them, the sap started dripping out immediately. On others, it came a little more sluggish.  The kids helped me set the taps and hang the buckets. 

We have a variety of types - one that I'm pretty sure is a sugar maple, one black, three of indeterminate sort. I'm not a tree expert, although I'd love to learn how to tell them apart with more confidence. There are a couple of other younger ones back in the woodline, but I ran out of taps, and figured this was a good enough trial run. 

Suddenly, though, I'm seeing the trees everywhere. There's a line of more than a dozen sugar maples not half a mile from my house on the edge of a field with no taps. There are more scattered along the side of the road. All of them with potential for tapping. Maybe if this goes well, I'll start some surreptitious roadside tapping next year. 

Once we collect the sap, we've still got to boil it down, of course. According to all the sources, it's a ratio of about 40:1. As in, you collect 40 quarts of sap to get a single quart of syrup. That's a lot of boil-off.

My Bride went eagerly out to check on the collection progress a few hours after we set the taps. We had less than an inch in most of the buckets for that first afternoon. And yesterday, it snowed again, and didn't get much out of the mid-thirties all day. But the rest of the week promises to be perfect weather, and I'm looking forward to seeing what we collect. 

In the meantime, I think I'm going to dig my copy of Farmer Boy back out and read it to the kids again.