I have decided to turn my art website over to one of the most important art forms of all for this very special, very early, absolutely tremendous 2010 maple syrup season. In the five years we’ve lived here in the Gatineau Hills, I have fine-tuned my tactics for making syrup. I hope I can share some of my knowledge here with other small time producers. By small-time, I mean folks with access to a couple of good sugar maple trees. I’ve incorporated my comments directly into the gallery, so click on the images to learn more. If you see any information that is inaccurate or you have tips you would like to add, please send me an email or comment.
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- Drilling the tree
Drill a hole in the tree around chest height. Use a 7/16" drill bit. The hole should be slightly downward so that the sap flows out of the tree easily. Never tap a tree that is less than 25cm in diameter at chest height. For big old maples you can put up to three taps. Make sure they are spaced out about 30 cm apart. The hole you drill should never be deeper than 5 cm (2 inches). I put black tape around the drill bit to ensure I don't go too deep.
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- Tapping the spigot
Tap the spigot into the tree enough that sap won't leak. Don't tap too hard, the spout breaks off easily. They make plastic spigots but don't use them. Plastic is bad.
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- Collecting the sap
I almost forgot: you do this activity when it's above freezing and sunny during the day and below freezing at night. Usually this means the last two weeks of March in the Gatineau hills. This year the sap is running on March 2nd. Ask any Republican: there is no global warming. The only time the weather is used as evidence of anything by Republicans is when there is a snowstorm in DC.
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- Taste Testing
One of these can be very helpful. Especially for testing the sap. A rule about sap drinking: when your trees are flowing full-on, drink all the sap you want. When the trees are flowing slowly, save all your sap for sugar.
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- Filtering the sap
Collect the sap. Filter it as you pour it in the evaporator. Ideally an evaporator is a wide shallow pan over an equally wide heat source. Ideally this heat source is a fire burning up all your scrub wood. And your whole sugaring off unit is in an open cabin in the back 40. My own system is much smaller. I boil the sap off in a large pot over a gas burner. I was very impressed by a unit I saw off Shouldice yesterday - a long stainless steel tray suspended over two rows of bricks. The maker had a sun chair facing the boiling unit (and south). That is the life.
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- High-yield sugar maples
Here are three of the trees we've tapped. We're lucky because we have trees that are big enough for two or three taps. In all we have 12 buckets collecting sap on six trees. The first day, after 24 hours, we collected 40 litres. That's enough for about a litre of maple syrup. It's important to tap trees on their south and west faces (for extra sun). The more time the tree spends in the sun, the more sap it gives. I learned this the hard way - many trees that are in a darker part of my lot provided very little sap in years past. Wasted spigots. Wasted buckets. Lots of slogging through deep melting snow. Not good. The following day, I collected 60 litres of sap. The three trees you see in this photo performed best. I think I probably could have emptied the buckets twice on the two largest trees you see here. This is especially amazing because in my experience, the first week of the season is usually rather slow. I now have a problem: I need to sugar off more quickly. I have no more storage.
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- Sugaring off
Sugaring off is, in some ways, the trickiest part of making syrup. I boil down the sap on a gas burner outside, but as the sap gets thicker, I move it indoors to finish on the stove. This is so that I can watch it carefully as it carmelises. When the bubbles begin to rise to the top of the pot, the maple syrup is ready. If you have a candy thermometre, the temperature should read 106 Celcius. I think.
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- Late-night boiling apparatus
Pullin' all-nighters over the gas burner is not a good idea. I move my sap to a slower cooking electric unit for overnights. That way when I get up in the morning, I have some nice thick sap, not a blackened pot.
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- Plink plink plink
Here are two buckets full. This tree is taking us over the top today. We're up to 60 litres and it's only two in the afternoon.
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- The first batch
Here is my first jar of syrup for the 2010 season from sap collected on March 3. The syrup is very dark. I confess that the first 20 litres burned to a crisp on my outdoor burner because I wasn't watching closely enough (see the previous page for notes on sugaring off). The pot had some blackened residue left in it when I started the next 20 litres and I think the created the dark colour. My second batch came out lighter.
