Maple Tapping!

Early on in the school year, I was doing a botany lesson at home with my kids and the book mentioned that there are many kinds of trees that can be tapped to make syrup. For whatever reason, this sparked some interest and we started to look at videos and blogs and other resources to learn more about maple tapping. Come to find out, there are around 27 different kinds of trees that can be tapped for syrup making and two of those were in our yard! The maple trees have the highest sugar content and that is why they are primarily used for syrup making. Four of our trees are Silver Maple and then we have a great big Box Elder tree which is a relative to the maples. (My sister has a bunch of birch trees that she has successfully tapped as well.) Since it was only September, we would have to wait a few months to experiment.

Our great big Box Elder tree

Fast forward a little while into March, the prime time to tap trees here in Southeast Idaho! The temperatures need to be below freezing at night and then reach the 40's during the day time. We started to get into the forties about the second week of March and the tapping kit we ordered arrived just in time.

We ordered a kit that came with ten spouts and hoses and a filter. They require a 5/16" drill bit. We got our supplies and headed outside! We drilled the holes about two feet up from the ground and each of the holes was at a slight upward angle and went in to the trunk about an inch. Almost instantly the sap began to flow out the hole. We firmly tapped a spout into the hole and set a bucket nearby to catch the drips.

A couple of our trees were large enough to have two taps. They need to be at least 18 inches in diameter to have more than one tap.

It was fun to watch the buckets gradually fill with sap. Some days, there would be a lot of flow and other days not much.

After about one week, we had collected close to fifteen gallons of sap. We had learned that the sap needs to be stored in a shady location and kept at 38 degrees or lower until it is boiled down. It needs to be boiled down within seven days of collecting it. Before boiling, remove any ice chunks that may be in the bucket.

We pulled out our Camp Chef cooker and placed the sap in to two large pots. We brought the sap to a rolling boil and then let it boil and boil and boil for the entire day. The first batch we made took about twenty hours to boil down because we left the lids on. Take the lids off! The second batch we did this and it only took ten hours to boil down. You can continue to add more sap to the pots as it boils down.

When there was only about four inches left in the pot, we took it inside to finish boiling down. When do you know it's done? There are fancy tools out there that you can use that tell you exactly when the sap has reached a syrup state but you can also take the temperature that your water boils at (it depends on your elevation. Ours was around 198 degrees) and add 7.1 degrees to that. We did this but then we mostly went with the flavor we liked. Ours didn't end up being very thick but the taste was amazing!

We immediately filtered the syrup and then poured it into hot jars and sealed it with a hot canning lid and ring. That was it!

Overall, we collected roughly thirty gallons of sap and got about one gallon of syrup. WE would have loved to do more but our trees had begun to bud out and that is the sign to stop collecting sap. Such a fun experiment and well worth the effort!