This is part 3 of a 4 part series on tapping an abundant resource, maple sap, to make fresh local maple syrup, crème and candy.

Parts 1–4 appear each Friday in March. Part 1, Tapping the Sap, appeared on March 5th, Part 2, Bucket by Bucket – The Gathering appeared last Friday.



So, intrepid syrup maker, you’ve located and tapped a number of likely sugar maples, and miracle of miracles, they actually produced buckets of sap. You’ve collected it all in one place, and it’s looking like a lot. Time to bring on the heat and make syrup.



Maple sap is only about 2% sugar on average; maple syrup is 66% sugar. To get it to that rich sweet consistency, you’ve got to boil off a lot of water. This takes a long time, so get used to it. In fact I’m writing this blog in the sugar shack, keeping an eye on the boiling sap and fire.  Thank goodness for laptops and wireless internet.



There are several ways to get rid of the water. If you find ice on top of your sap when you collect it, toss it out- unless it’s all ice. The water part freezes first and leaves the more sugary sap behind. Thank you Ma Nature, for the assist. Commercial syrup makers often use reverse osmosis rigs to remove about 40% of the water, but for the home operation, they are far too expensive. That means you need to boil. And boy, do you need to boil, and boil, and boil.



When I started out, I just boiled the sap in pots on the kitchen stove- easy and convenient.  It took me about 24 hours to boil 30 gallons of sap into roughly 3 quarts of syrup that way. Not a bad way to start, although make sure you open a window or have a strong fan to ventilate the steam- it can and will remove your wallpaper.



If you get into it in a bigger way, you’re going to want to boil outdoors. You can do it over a propane flame with a turkey cooker type set up as shown here.  Or you can stack up some cement blocks, put a flat pan on top and  build a fire underneath – smoky, but gets the job done- You can even add a chimney to the back of the set up to draw away the smoke.



Or if you really get bit by the sugar bug, you’ll build a sugar house, like the one I made over the past year, out of a few trees that I thinned from my wooded property and had milled.



The heart of the sugar house is the evaporator- a fancy version of the cement block and pan thing. It consists of a steel stove with an open top known as an arch, a channeled pan to do the evaporating, and a prewarming sap pan that leads to it. My set up was built from reclaimed steel stove parts and scrap by a friend who stopped sugaring and passed it on to me.





The roof of the sugar shack has a ventilator for the steam. It looks like a little house on top of the big one with louvers or windows to open and let the steam rise up and out. I also added side windows — also reclaimed — for extra ventilation.



Build a fire, add the sap and start boiling. And boiling. And boiling. Did I mention boiling? My rig evaporates about 10 gallons of sap an hour going at full steam. If I run it for 10 hours, I’ll get about 2.5 gallons of syrup. But that’s on a Sunday when I’m out there tending it full time. When I’m working in the office or around the yard and only checking it every half hour or so, I get a lot less. I have friends who come over and help, and we split the syrup among us based on hours put in. It’s way below minimum wage work, but we do it for love of maple, not money.



An elevated collection tank with a hose running into the shack...



...and into a prewarming pan. Find the right flow rate and just stoke the fire.



After you’ve boiled it forever, skimming off any foam that forms on the surface, you’ll see the temperature rising above boiling — 214, 215, and so on.



Time to take your digital candy thermometer and check the temperature of boiling water — it varies day by day — and keep boiling your sap  until it is 7.4 degrees above that. Yesterday I poured off the syrup at 221.4 degrees.



Now you are ready to filter and bottle, which we’ll get into next week. I hope you’ve been drinking the sap as table water- it’s delicious- and sampling the ever sweetening sap as you boil. Now get ready for the finished product- the syrup. We’ll also show you how to make it into maple crème and all the way to sugar. In the meanwhile, keep boiling!