It's spring here...or I should say it's finally starting to warm up and the snow is melting. It's also time to tap the maple trees and make some very delicious maple syrup. There is a lot of work that goes into making this yummy goodness, and so I thought I would share some pictures and explain the process for anyone interested in seeing what it takes.
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| We have 450 taps, so the woods like this |
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| To tap the tree you drill a hole and then pound in the spile...when the sap runs up the tree during the day and down again at night it drips from the spile into the bucket |
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| When we need to empty the buckets we take the truck with the tank in the back around and empty all the buckets...sometimes it takes several trips. |
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| It's easiest to carry 5 gallon buckets into the woods |
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| Then you take the metal bucket off the tree, empty it into the plastic one, return the metal bucket onto the spile and proceed to the next tap (or metal bucket) |
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| When your buckets are full or getting to heavy to carry you carry them back to the truck and empty them into the tank....after you buckets are empty, you go back and fill them again, back-and-forth....until all 450 are empty!!! |
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| Emptying the full bucket into the tank on the truck |
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| Our cooker...it's much longer than it looks...it's 4 feet wide and 12 feet long (or 1.2 meters by 3.6 meters) |
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| Underneath the front pan is where we build the fire...it needs to burn hot and fast and so somebody has to stoke it every 2-3 minutes. It can get really warm! |
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| You can kind of see how thick the cast iron is in the above picture, and the fire is hot enough that it's making the iron red...when you open the doors to stoke that fire to keep it that hot you get a blast of heat!! Not to brag, but that's my fire. |
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| This is one the side of the pan and someone gets to watch this...once the needle is at 7 (where it is now) it should be syrup in the pan that needs to be drawn off |
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| It's syrup, we draw it off and let it run through a filter and to remove and dirt and sediment that may be there |
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| After its been filtered it gets poured into the top pan and reheated, after it's hot it goes into the pan on the lower left where it's filtered again and then bottled. |
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| The syrup in the top pan being reheated |
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| The finished syrup getting it's last filtering before bottling |
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| Bottling the syrup |
This year the sugar content hasn't been fabulous. What that means is that right now on average it takes 59 gallons (223 liters) of sap to make 1 gallon (3.8 liters) of syrup (we have to boil out 58 gallons of water). Needless to say it takes many hours and lots of hard work, but being able to eat the pure maple syrup that you worked so hard for all year round is somehow rewarding. :)
