Boiling Sap Into Maple Syrup | Small Scale

Hi everyone, welcome back. Today we are boiling sap and we are turning it into maple syrup. So I've done a few videos on us making maple syrup in the past. Oh the steam from the evaporator is really going. And in my other videos, I'll link to them, but I showed how our process a long time ago and what we used to do. And then we have shown a little tour of our new evaporator setup we had a few years ago. But it's been a couple years since I showed you guys how we make maple syrup. So in today's video, I thought I would go over what our system is, what we tried in the past, and just go step-by-step how to make maple syrup if it's something you want to try in your own backyard. So we're just out here by the evaporator. It's a beautiful day and we're going to bring you along with us. When's the last time you added? Smells like syrup season. So the first step in making maple syrup is to tap your trees. We tapped our trees about a week ago and we've been collecting sap on the warm days. We're going to go check our trees to see how good they're running and collect our sap. And we'll go over with you guys how to tap your trees for collecting sap. But we're going to have to get there first, so we're going to take the snowmobile down into the woods. The part Eric likes the best. So Eric just wanted to get started collecting sap and I'm going to talk about how you get started making maple syrup. That first step, which is to tap the trees. So in order to tap your trees, you need to be able to find sugar maple trees. You can also tap different kinds of maples, like red maple, silver maple, any kind of maple will do. How I like to tell my maple trees is by the bud. The easiest way is by the leaf. So if you think about the Canadian flag and the leaf, that's a maple leaf. But if your trees are in the spring like it is now and they have no leaves on them, the bud is the next best way to tell. So I'll show you what the bud looks like. Okay, so this is off the tree behind me. Let's see if I can show you. So that is a sugar maple bud and it is golden as you can see color and it's kind of pointed. And below it are where the leaf buds are. And those, see how they're opposite? They're straight across each other. If they were staggered, it wouldn't be a maple tree. So that shows that it's a maple. There's other trees that have opposite leaves as well, but maples do. Red maples will be a really distinct burgundy red color and not quite so pointy. So that's how you tell it's a sugar versus a red maple. And then also besides the buds, it's the bark. The bark is pretty tight. It's a great color and it often has those white spots. As the maple gets older, the bark will look different. So if you have a young maple tree, it's going to look probably tight. There are different types of trees you can tap. You can tap birch trees, but for sugar maple, you need maple trees. And if you tap sugar maple trees over red maple, you'll have more sugar in the sap. There'll be less water content. So you're going to need less sap to make maple syrup. If you tap only red maple, you'll still get really delicious syrup, but you'll just need more sap quantities. Another thing you need to have besides just maple trees is you need to have the right climate. So here in New Brunswick, Canada, it is usually the end of March and the beginning of April that has the right temperatures for us. So that is to get below freezing at night and above freezing in the day. The time of year that has those temperature changes from night to day will depend on where you're at and what part of the world you're in. So now that you have your trees picked out and you know that you have some maple trees, the next step is to tap them. To tap your trees, you're going to drill a hole into the side of the tree. You want to pick healthy trees. If the crown looks really dead or it just doesn't look like it's very healthy or it's really small, you're going to want to skip that one and pick a healthier tree that's a bit more mature. So behind me here, this one is probably about 10 centimeters dbh, diameter at breast height, and this one is significantly larger. So this is actually one of our smaller trees we have tapped, but it's a good size to tap. This one we skipped and just left it for another year. Once it may be in 10 years, it gets older. So to tap your tree, you're going to need a drill. We use a hand drill and we just do this because it's nostalgic and Eric has his old grandfather's hand drill. But you're going to put a hole in that's about an inch deep. It needs to be deep enough for the spile to fit in. And while you're drilling it, you're going to want to put it on a slight incline up. That just helps gravity to have the sap flow out. Doesn't need to be very much, but it's a little bit of an upward angle is what we usually aim for. So you drill your hole in about an inch deep and then the next thing to do is to put in your spile. You can get the spiles at a lot of places. We go to our local farm supply store where we buy our grain for our animals and they sell maple syrup products. Usually if you live in a climate that has the right conditions for making maple syrup, then the local feed stores will sell the sap supplies. If not, you can probably find them online on Amazon and things like that. You'll put the spile in. You're going to hammer it in. You don't want to hammer it in super deep or it's going to be really hard to get out at the end of the season. So just put it in strong enough that it has a nice hold and it can hang the weight of the bucket. We use buckets that are actually made from maple syrup and just because they come with a little hole on them and they hang nicely on the tree, you can use a lot of different things. Some people use old random pot bottles or five gallon pails and if you decide to use something besides the maple syrup pail, it's nice to have something that has a cover that can go over it. So you need the spile to be able to come out and drip into your bucket, but covering it up helps keep any rain out or any snow out and bugs and things a little bit. If you have a lot of snow and rain coming into your bucket, that's just going to add more water and make your boiling process a lot longer. You'll know it's time to take your spiles out and that the syrup season is over when it's not going below freezing at nighttime. So when that starts to happen, your sap's going to start to go buddy, people call it, and it just doesn't taste as good. It has a different smell. It's going to be maybe cloudy and it won't produce good syrup. So when that happens and it's always warm, even at nighttime, you know it's time to pull your spiles and our season around here usually lasts about three weeks. So once the trees are tapped and you have your bucket on, you'll leave them to collect sap. This is our first big day of collecting, so we'll go check on Eric and see how much he has collected. Yeah, oh wow, it looks nice and clear. Oh yeah, fresh sap. So this is our system for collecting our sap. What Eric does is he puts this sled on the back of the snowmobile and with these blue bins and we pull it down into the woods and then he'll detach it and take it down into the trail where we can't get the snowmobile down into. And then we bring the pails of sap up to the sled so we can drag it away. And past years we have just carried these blue tubs around in the woods with us to each tree and they just get really heavy, especially when you're on a hill. And so this year we found it just easier to bring the pails, we just be really careful, pull the sap and dump them in here. And these have a screw on top on purpose so that it doesn't splash around and we don't lose any sap. We'll bring it back up to the evaporator. Is there any more to do? No. Next spot? Yeah. Can you hear me? Ready? Starting to get dark. So in years past we've tried different methods on how to filter our sap. It's a very important step because it gets all the bark and bugs and all that other stuff out of your sap. So we used to put a bed sheet over here and then we would put in a cord or a rope around it and then I would pour the jugs through that bed sheet, filtering it into our main barrel here. So this year I'm trying something a little different. So I put the old t-shirt over it and I got one of Maggie's elastics over the top. Make sure it's on there pretty good and it actually works as a really good filter. And then I take off the back cap so it flows out of that real nice. I like this way better because I can actually see the sap coming out of it and see what my level is. Whereas before with the bed sheet I was always just guessing how much sap I had in the barrel. So we store our sap in this 55 gallon drum all the time. So we collect the sap from the trees. Eric filters it into the drum and then for us it stays cold enough in here because when it gets down cold at night time sometimes it'll freeze a little bit or just stay really cold and then we keep it in the shade of the building and it's fine for us. It never gets too hot. You know your sap has gone spoiled which it can do if it gets too warm. If it's gone cloudy or it doesn't smell as fresh anymore or when you taste it it doesn't quite taste right. It doesn't it should just taste like sweet water. So if you open up your drum and it looks not clear then you know that your sap has gotten too warm and it's gone bad. I'd say it spoils and it'll go cloudy but also as the season progresses and you get closer to the end of the season your sap will get a little cloudy yeah and it'll still be okay. It'll just produce darker syrup. So that's a little bit about how we store our sap until we have time to boil it in our evaporator to make it into syrup. So the next step is boiling your sap to turn it into maple syrup. So the reason you boil it is because the sap is mostly water content with a little bit of sugar and you boil it to get rid of the water and that this leaves the syrup. If you keep boiling it and you boil it too far you're gonna end up with just crystallized sugar which I actually do make myself sometimes and we use that in place of white sugar in a lot of recipes. But today our goal is to make maple syrup so leaving the sugar with a bit of water content to make that nice textured syrup. So there are a lot of different ways to boil maple syrup. We've done it a couple different ways. The first year when we did it we were just dating and we decided we were going to tap about 10 trees and we just did it in a pot like a pot for the cooking in over a propane little stove and it took forever but we got like two bottles of maple syrup that year. It was a disaster. It tasted gross. We did horrible. I think it was like buddy or something and we took it too far and it was crystallized so I want to do this video to try to help you avoid it going wrong because it's so much work. So if you're just doing a few trees you could do it on your stove in your house and boil it down. It's going to take a while. You're going to want a good hood vent to get away all that steam or your house will be very steamy but that's why most people do it outdoors and so we did it outdoors on a pot. It worked but we wanted to upgrade the next year. So the next year we went to some chafing dishes. They're like shallow and wide on top of cinder blocks with a fire underneath and that was pretty good. It was hard to control the temperature. It was fine for like 15 trees and just a little setup in the backyard. It was pretty cheap. We bought the chafing dishes off Amazon and I actually have a video about it. I think it was one of my first videos ever made and I can link to it but it worked pretty good and it's a good first step. The next step we took was getting ourselves an evaporator and Eric's going to go over our whole evaporator system for you. There's different types of evaporators in different sizes. Ours is a pretty small scale one because it's just for our own use so it's whatever way works best for you. The main things you want to have are a large surface area so you can have a lot of evaporation, a hot fire that's close to the base of your pot, and then you also need to be able to keep a close eye on your temperature. So depending on where you're at the temperature will vary slightly. So if you know somebody that boils syrup, ask them what temperature to take it to. So whatever your boiling point of water is, which you can measure yourself, you go seven degrees past that and that's what you take from maple syrup. So ours is 219 degrees Fahrenheit but we don't go right to 219 on the evaporator. It's hard to control the temperature and so we want to be really careful with it. So we take it to what like 214? Try to take it to 214 and then we'll draw it off and finish it in the house on our stove. So Eric's going to go over our setup for this year. Yeah this is our firebox and I stuck a couple of fresh sticks of wood in there. I've got some fire bricks in there and I have a grate on the bottom and I could probably use another row of fire bricks. They make a huge difference and eventually I would like to get what they call fire blanket and it just adds an extra layer of insulation to keep it nice and hot. This is an old oil barrel for heating a house with oil and then this is an old furnace door on the front and my friend and neighbor helped me build it there a couple years ago and I love it. It's great and it was relatively inexpensive. So this is the pan I got made by a gentleman in Quebec and it has three sections and then a warming tray on the back and it's two feet across by three feet long and you can get them all different sizes but this is the perfect size for what we do. So up top we have our warming tray and I just filled it up there a few minutes ago and the principle of this is to get your sap relatively warm before you add it to your main pan because if you add cold sap then it's going to kill your boil so I wait till this gets warm and then I'll open this ball valve over here and I'll let it drip out very slightly and so then that will continuously add sap to our pan and when it starts in this chamber it'll be a light color because it's mostly sap but as it cooks down it'll start to move to the next chamber and then finally to the final chamber will be darker. So if you have this working right you'll have almost clear sap here then you'll have like a light amber in the middle section and then as we get closer to being finished it'll get quite dark over on that section. When it gets to this section it'll almost be finished syrup and we have a dial thermometer on the side. On this thermometer you can see seven there so that would indicate finished syrup because it's seven degrees above the boiling point of water but we never get there on this actual evaporator. We draw it off before then so we can have more control inside. So that is how we keep track of the temperature out here. So on the back we've got a smoke stack and basically the purpose of that is just to help it draw out air from the firebox and out through the top and it keeps the ash from going into your your syrup and your sap. I mean sometimes we still get a little bit but it just adds to the flavor. I love how warm it is against the firebox it's a nice it warms your legs up sometimes too much when you're standing beside it but we'll now stand here pretty much all day and we'll keep adding sap into the pans and once it gets later in the evening and our sap gets almost through we'll let it boil down and we'll draw it off to finish it inside. So it's the next day and we decided to finish boiling today instead last night and it's just about ready to draw off our sap and that we have boiled down to syrup and then I'll finish it on the stove while air continues to boil down more sap out here. So we're getting ready to draw off so I want to fill up my warming pan with cold sap and so when we draw off in order that we don't burn the pan or ruin our batch I basically open up this ball valve when we have this one opened and it'll force all the close to finish syrup into this pot and then it'll leave cold sap in there to continue to boil. Okay so this is our filter we have it's a wool filter and we built this little wooden stand with a hole in it and so we stick the pot underneath we open this ball valve and then it'll go running through the filter and it'll get a lot of the sand that is made from boiling it but then we'll filter it again before we bottle so we filter it twice. So right now we're hovering around 215 and inside the evaporator you can't see right now because of the steam but the bubbles are getting really really tight and that means that we're getting close to finished syrup and so we're going to draw off now and take it inside and finish it in there. So now we have the syrup drawn off I'm going to take it inside and start finishing it on the stove. We're going to transfer it over to this bigger pot when you're boiling your syrup when it gets close to being that stage of syrup when it's almost finished it's going to start to foam up and if it's really full in your pot it'll boil over it makes a huge mess. One way to avoid that is just to use a taller pot so we're going to use this pot so that when there's more room for it to foam up and also you can do a couple other things like using some butter around the rim to just help kill the foam so people do that and we've tried it it works pretty good. So we're getting close we're at I think last time I checked was at 217. Something you'll need is a thermometer we've tried a lot of different thermometers some cheap candy ones that didn't actually work. We used to borrow one from a neighbor and it was super awesome an old wooden one but this year we're trying the KitchenAid digital thermometer. It's nice having a probe so you don't burn your hand off trying to get it down the pot and so this is what we're trying out this year and it seems to work pretty good. So I'm going to put the probe in. It's hot still but and it is getting to 217. It's at 217 right now so we have like two more degrees to go and then we will filter it into another pot and then right away while it's hot we'll put it into bottles. So it's starting to foam a little bit and that's why we want this real tall pot but look how much has dropped the level will go way down but this will still have some really nice syrup. It's crazy how little it is. How much has basically gone? Not much. So we finished making our maple syrup for today. We have in total in bottles about 1.6 liters here and then a little bit extra here. So we always keep a bottle in the fridge that isn't sealed and that way every time we boil the little bit that doesn't quite make a bottle we just add to this and that's what we eat first. So we got 1.6 liters from about probably roughly 200 liters. So we're pretty happy. We're just going to leave the bottles lying on their side like this just to help them seal. If you have a seal failure you can freeze them. We have people that we know that don't freeze all their syrup. However you because they're in glass bottles you want to make sure you don't fill them as full if you're going to freeze them. So now we're going to have a little taste test to see how it turned out. It's a really pretty color. That's my favorite kind of taste in it. That's good. It's sweet. Super sweet. If we have vanilla ice cream our favorite way to have fresh syrup is over some ice cream but we'll just eat it with this. So good. So thanks so much for watching. We appreciate you guys following us along with our maple syrup day two days. If you have any questions leave them in the comments and we'll do our best to get back to you. Have a great day and we'll see you on the next one.