Tapping the Trees Pt2

Well, it's been several weeks of experimenting and so far the tapping of the maple trees has worked fairly well.  Some things we'll definitely be doing differently next year though. 

We've decided that next year we'll do the collection part very differently.  This year we used Grimm taps and hung milk jugs underneath to collect the sap.  It worked okay....until the wind blew.  Living on a hill with no windbreak in springtime is gusty to say the least, and as long as there was a good amount of sap to weigh down the jugs, the wind was no problem.  As soon as we emptied the jugs, they were nothing short of wind catchers, blowing about with sap spilling on the ground.  Next year, we'll try the rubber tubing and 5 gal bucket approach.

Boiling down was experimental too.  With the aforementioned wind, it was difficult to get a good, hot, smokeless fire going, even with a homemade-ugly rocket stove.  The first batch tasted so smokey, it had to be dumped.  And it's absolutely true what they say, that you CANNOT boil down sap indoors.  Just trust me on this one, okay?  We ended up using a propane stove in the garage to boil the sap down and then finished it indoors on the stove. 

So far we've produced about a gallon of finished syrup...which isn't too shabby considering the fact we only tapped 5 trees and lost our first batch due to smoke.  The resulting syrup is very light, almost honey-colored ,with a very mild maple flavor.  It's thicker than commercial syrup, though not as thick as Aunt Jemima pancake syrup.  Over all we're very pleased with the product and we're planning on trying it again next year.  There is just something incredibly satisfying about producing sweetener from one's own trees.  And as producing a sweetener was on my list of things to learn, I can cross that off the list and move on to the next.  Yay for accomplishing goals!