This winter has been a good one here in the Hudson Valley: a little snow, a little sun, and the groundhog played nice earlier this month. A couple of weeks before Valentine's Day, I grabbed some maple-syrup-tapping tubes I'd ordered online some years ago and tapped the sole sugar maple we have in our yard (it's a great tree, by the way: When we moved here 20 years ago, we found that the previous owner had installed hooks on that tree and another at just the right distance to hang a hammock. Since then, we've spent many a sunny afternoon swinging gently, listening to the birds and watching chipmunks and squirrels scamper ... but I digress). A clean, used plastic milk jug was the perfect container to rig up my tap - lightweight, recycled, and just translucent enough to see the yield as it accumulates. I drilled a small hole a couple inches into the tree and gently tapped in the plastic spile that's connected to the tapping tube. Then I cut an "X" in the cap, threaded the tube through it, then tied the jug to the tree to prevent the wind from knocking it around. It's not pretty, but it gets the job done.
On Valentine's Day, I saw the jug was just over half full, so I emptied it into two quart-size mason jars.
The thing about maple sap is that it's mostly water. To get syrup, the sap needs to be boiled down, and that's a steamy, somewhat sticky job. Following the lead of one of my favorite bloggers, Karen Bertelsen of @theartofdoingstuff, I decided to evaporate it outside on a homemade rocket stove.
To start, I needed bricks. About 24-30 of them would do. Luckily, a friend in a neighboring town was gracious enough to allow my husband, Jim, and son, Marty, to trespass into her backyard when she wasn't home and snag some.
Back at home, we took a garden paver and set it on a level patch of ground near the woodpile. Our other son Tommy is super cautious and raked all the loose grass and twigs from around the paver to avoid catching them on fire. We lay four bricks in a horseshoe shape, set an old grill grate on top, created another horseshoe shape, then stacked above that about seven layers of four bricks each. The point is to have an air chamber on the bottom and your fuel layer on the grate.
We had no shortage of tinder for the stove, thanks to the emerald ash borer and the friendly neighborhood woodpeckers. I gathered armfuls of bark from the ground around one of our dying ash trees and dumped them in an old wagon that I parked next to the stove.
The sap was poured into a stainless-steel stockpot (the wider the pot, the quicker the sap will evaporate) and set on another grill grate on top of the stove. Within several minutes, steam was coming off the sap and we were in business.
It was a waiting game, for sure. The pot never boiled, per se, but it kept steaming away for about four hours. Marty and I (and Freckles, our Jack Russell/cattle dog mix) took a little break from babysitting the stove to go shed hunting in the woods behind our house. I just learned about shed hunting, and boy was I surprised to find out that it had everything to do with finding old deer antlers and nothing to do with lawn equipment shelters. We came up empty-handed as far as antlers but did enjoy the walk in the sunshine.
Back at the stove, Freckles was getting chilly. So we put on the sweater I'd bought at a church tag sale in the fall, dragged out our daughter Ellen's old pink, furry Papasan chair, and she was comfy. Next, I set up a card table, ran an extension cord to a turntable, grabbed some old vinyl that once belonged to some ancestors, and we were in business (Fittingly, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" was the first selection).
Jim came home with Tommy, and he broke out some bourbon. We have family in Wisconsin who grill what they call "flip-flop chicken" on a grill that needs to be flipped back and forth. Babysitting that grill takes time - usually spent with a few beers and great conversation. Jim and I decided that sap evaporating could be a similarly enjoyable pastime!
Since the pot wasn't covered, bits of dust and other schmutz found their way into the pot. Occasionally I would pour the sap into another pot that I'd fitted with a coffee-filter-lined colander, cleaned out the original pot, and poured it back in. Finally, the sap started to take on a beige tint and, before long, it had dwindled down to nearly nothing. I poured it into a clean mason jar and measured our yield: More than a half-gallon of sap yielded a couple of ounces of syrup.
The tap is still dripping sap, and the rocket stove stands ready for another fire. This was fun, and I can't wait to make syrup again!
Oh yes, for sure! It was a great way to spend an afternoon.
Great experience and informative blog...will you make this a tradition?