Homemade Maple Syrup (Honorary Parents Post)

Parents hacking your blog! Wendy, being the idea person in the relationship, thought that making maple syrup would be fun this year. Being the last week of March, it was late for Minnesota, but we got started. I, being more action oriented, stopped by Fleet Farm to buy the necessary equipment, but they were about sold out. We only had a few things left…. so Amazon delivered 10 taps with short hoses the next day. However, we only have one maple tree. It was a seedling brought home by our Jamie, our fourth grader at the time (The youngest of the 3 siblings, is now a baker and needs to post about that!). I called it stick. She said it was a tree and it ended up in the yard. My plan was to mow it down by “accident” if necessary (shhhh…..don’t tell her) so not much thought was put into where it landed. It is now 12″ in diameter and 20+ feet tall. It got one tap. Our neighbor, Mike, has 2 maple trees. One is a massive tree that is really 7 trees that grew into one, the base looked about 48″ in diameter or more and the other tree is about half that size. The larger tree got 7 taps and the smaller one got 2. The first 2 days not much happened. (One thought on the buckets, the first ones got holes in the sides for the hoses. This was so that water could puddle on the lids and not leak into the buckets. But the holes were tight enough on the hoses that it was not an issue. The later buckets had the hoses run in through the lids and that made it easier to just change the bucket instead of having to dump it into a different bucket)

The large maple with 7 taps, The smaller maple tree with 2 is in the background

Wendy checked in the afternoon and the 1 gallon jugs were full. She filled her stock pot and asked me to buy more 5 gallon buckets on the way home. When I got home, 3 were full, and back to Lowes I went for 5 more. The jugs were replaced with buckets to keep them from overfilling.

In a week, there was 45 gallons of sap in the garage.

The cold Minnesota weather helped keep the sap from fermenting but we didn’t want to let it sit too long. On Saturday, when I got home from work, I started a fire in the front yard fire pit and started cooking. But not much progress was made using only 2 roasting pans from Goodwill. The 3rd one was Teflon and Wendy wouldn’t let me use it due to Teflon. She’s funny about these kind of things…

Dad made the grate from a bed frame he found on the side of the street

Sunday morning the operation was moved to the larger firepit in the back yard. A 30 quart pot was added to the mix by my brother Andy.

The roasting pans worked great to boil the sap before adding it to the pot. If anything got too hot and looked like it was going to boil over some cool sap was added to end the boiling.

But this was taking a long time too. Wendy drove to Aaron’s house (who, as the oldest sibling needs to post about some drinks) and picked up some of his beer making supplies. Two burners with large pots were added to the project. Another 10+ gallons of sap was added to the stockpile from the trees.

The burners work better than the fire because the heat is constant. The fire is nice because the fuel is free.

We had about 9 hours of cooking time but then had to shut down to go to the Bon Jovi concert. Jamie’s live music obsession comes from Wendy (ask her about her being snuck into a concert at First Avenue). The pots were left outside to cool down in a snow storm, but were still 52 degrees in the morning. Wendy started cooking again at 2 pm on the burners, waiting for me to get home. When I arrived, I pulled the taps from the trees and another 4-5 gallons was added. Neighbor Brad donated another burner/pot and that sped thing up further. At 11 pm the magical 219 degrees was reached and the cooking was over. The pot was left in the garage until morning.

As the water boiled off the pots were combined and all fit into one. That started as 55+ gallons of sap.

In the morning the syrup was still 80 degrees but was heated back up to 145 so it would flow better while filtering/canning.

I am always looking for something to build, so I cut a board to make a filtering station.

The filters clog up but can be washed out with hot water and reused.

Think this is coffee she is drinking? Think again! That’s going to be a hard sugar crash later!

The reduction ratio says 40-1, but we ended up with over 2 1/2 gallons. The best part was walking around to the neighbors handing out jars.

Wendy: The best part was running around our neighbor friends’ yards like the children that we are, when we have a new adventure.

The rest of the jars got post-it notes for a lot of lucky people who like waffles.

The cleanup from the fire toasted pans was disgusting. A soot nightmare. Pans being disposed. Wendy threw them out of the house.

We are definitely planning on doing this again next year. It is a great time to spend a week while waiting for the garden to thaw. The garden may need to be another post.