Making Homemade Maple Syrup, the Saga

In case you didn't catch my post on venison heart and liver steaks, I'm something of an "outdoor" girl. I grew up on a 40 acre sugar bush, a hardwood forest composed of about 80% sugar maple trees. My dad was a professional hobbyist, and he loved the idea of being able to live off the land. He was also a master metallurgist, which made it easy for him to fabricate his own large-scale evaporator, tree taps and sugar shack. It's funny, because he never had an over-fondness for maple syrup; he mostly liked the idea that he could make it himself.

Growing up, we would plunge into a large-scale maple syrup "operation" every spring, and Dad would harvest between 20 and 30 gallons from our 40 acre wood, with countless hours of work in every drop. It worked out very well for my mom and me, who love to use syrup as a natural sugar substitute (like honey, but way better) and as Christmas presents.

Since my dad passed away a few years ago, keeping the maple syrup operation alive has been a pressing issue every spring. For the last few years, a good friend and neighbor of ours volunteered to put in most of the work in exchange for his use of our evaporator and trees. This year, however, Tim had moved to the UP, and it was up to mom, my husband and me to keep our pantry full of syrup. Mom has described making maple syrup as "addictive", and it's true; when the first spring thaw comes, mom and I itch to tap trees. My sweet, dedicated husband gave up several weeks of work this year (not to mention doing some extensive physical labor) to make sure we kept the tradition going.

Tim filtering syrup before canning

There's far too much to tell about the making of maple syrup than could be said in one blog post, and the web has plenty of great resources on the specifics of making maple syrup, so let's do a brief walkthrough of the Steele Family maple syrup operation.

Tapped maple trees

The time to tap trees is as soon as the weather begins to turn and things begin to thaw. In order for the sap to run, it has to get below freezing at night and above freezing during the day. Ideal maple syrup weather runs in the mid to high 40s during the day and mid to low 20s at night.

The same trees can be tapped every year, as long as you don't tap in the same place (tapping the same trees makes it easier to know which are maples, if you're not an expert woodsman).

My husband and a friend enjoying some "well-earned comforts" after hauling sap all day

Maple sap itself is clear and tastes like slightly sweet water - I like to call it nature's gatorade. It's so delicious, especially when it's icy cold and you've been working hard! It has a very high water content; the ratio of sap needed to make maple syrup is roughly 40:1. That's right - for every one gallon of syrup we hope to make, we have to collect 40 gallons of sap. The sugar content varies, depending on how good the "run" is. If it's ideal weather, we'll collect earlier in the morning and remove the ice from the buckets (the sugar doesn't freeze) to cut out some of the boiling time.

My dad's creation: a wood-fueled evaporator with a 30 gallon capacity

Because there's such an intense amount of boiling required, the more sap you can boil at a time, the better. My dad built an ingeniously large evaporator, complete with stainless steel welded pan and iron grating in the stove compartment below. We can boil 30 gallons of sap at a time, and when we have it at a rolling boil, we usually add between 10 and 15 gallons of sap per hour.

In order to get a decent sized batch, we usually aim to fit 250-300 gallons of sap into the evaporator before we think about "finishing" the batch. At about 200 gallons it begins to turn dark, at which point we begin checking it with the hydrometer.

Maple syrup hydrometer and its copper cylinder

We kill the fire and take the batch off just before it reaches its "hot float point", then we bring it into the house to filter, finish and can it on the stove. A batch of 250-300 gallons usually yields around 10 gallons of syrup, give or take some.

Thick felt syrup filters

Before we put it on the stove inside, we filter it through these felt filters. If the batch has a particularly high sediment level, we might filter it twice.

Syrup being finished on the stove

Finally, we boil it until it reaches the "hot float point", bring it upstairs and can it.

Mom and Tim's wife, Fae, canning syrup on the stove

Easy, right?! Not quite, but you couldn't ask for a better pasttime or family tradition. This year we pulled taps on the trees two weeks before the season was over (life got in the way), but we still managed to make about 10 gallons. We're hoping to reach our 20 gallon average next year.