The maple syrup season is once more upon us, and memories are strong within me of youthful visits to the sugar bush.
Scenes of horse-drawn sleighs, roaring fires, smoke-filled woods, and rubber boots full of melting snow are accented by secret sips of sweet sap from the metal buckets and fresh-from-the-pan samples of the final product.
Syrup making is a simple process: just collect the excess sap from a wound in a maple tree, boil it down to a sticky substance, and pour liberally on a stack of pancakes! Easy-breezy! And many a young family has undertaken this ancient task with initial gusto and high expectations. What could possibly go wrong?
Firstly, you have to really 'want' to do this — syrup production is best suited to those who enjoy working in the woods. In fact, it goes deeper than a commercial want, as a good producer (and all those who help out) must have this woodsy trait 'in their blood'. The lure of a $60 return for a gallon of syrup often clouds the better vision of what is actually required to make said gallon.
And as romantic as it sounds, sap collection and boiling is actually hard work over long hours. Don't forget that.
This process is not one that can be done on your time schedule. Rather, you must work ‘like the Dickens’ to boil the sap when it's fresh, and nature calls the shots as to when the sap will flow best.
Secondly, you're going to need access to some sugar maple trees. This sounds deceptively simple. Sugar maple trees produce the sweetest sap, not red maple nor Norway maple nor silver maple ... you require sugar maple.
And the sweetest of the sweet are those sugar maples found along roadsides, field edges and in other open sunny areas. Large, full crowns indicate a better and sweeter sap than trees grown in tight formation within a thick woodlot.
You will need easy access to each tree, as tapping equipment can be cumbersome, and full sap pails are heavy. If it's a struggle to carry the pails from the tree to the collecting tank, then that difficult to access pail may be 'overlooked' and soon contain spoiled sap ... which is a waste of time for you and an unnecessary wound in the tree.
To get around the battle of the slopes (which is common terrain in our woodlots) a new-fangled system of plastic tubing has been invented. All the trees are interconnected with a web of tubing, which allows the sap to run downhill from tap to tank using gravity. Easy, right?
Tubing has been a blessing to many a syrup producer, shifting the work from manually and daily slugging heavy collecting pails, to stringing, suspending, repairing and cleaning several kilometres of light plastic lines.
In large woodlots, these feeder and main lines are left hanging all year, with just the drop line (from the tree to the main line) being removed from the tree. This practice saves a lot of time and effort each spring, but is considered unsightly by some and often needs repair: falling limbs, nibbling squirrels and running deer or moose can cause major headaches to a sap line owner.
Just a side note about those squirrels: the original method of cleaning the plastic lines was to backwash them with a water and bleach solution. But if any bleach remained in the line, it formed a salty crust ... and squirrels love a salty-tasting snack. Hence, nibbled holes in the lines. Nowadays a water and air mix is sent under pressure through the lines as a cleaner.
OK, trees selected, taps in place, collection system figured out ... now let's make syrup!
It takes about 40 units of sap to make one unit of syrup. That's a lot of boiling, a lot of steam, and a lot of fuel. The rate of boil needs to be monitored closely or you can burn the syrup.
The steam is sticky, so be sure the sugar house is very well ventilated (personal note: don't do this boiling process on the indoor kitchen stove!). And whether you use wood, propane or oil for a fuel, have lots of it available and handy.
A typical boiling day runs 10 hours, plus start-up and clean-up time. Each tap should yield about one gallon of sap a day. The backyard operation may have 10 taps, which is 10 gallons a day, which divided by 10 hours of boiling means your evaporator pan must handle one gallon per hour, which most small fires or propane camp stoves can handle. And don't forget about proper filtering and canning techniques.
This will yield about one litre of syrup, or about $10 worth of product. This is paying you $1 per hour, minus overhead costs, of course.
Have I dispelled the romantic notion of making your own syrup? In a way I hope not, because it really is fun and rewarding.
But do think it through before you start drilling holes in maple trees. Maybe the afternoon spent with the kids at an established sugar camp (and the inevitable $60 purchase) is the preferred (and comparatively inexpensive) alternative.