Sweet!

While growing up, my dad, brother and I would tap the dozen or so sugar maples around the house to boil down and make maple syrup from. Those many March's always bring pleasant memories of my childhood and teenage years. Eventually I took over the operation of tapping and collection, but mom & dad would always help with the boiling and the canning. We'd end up with several quarts per year - enough to last us for a years worth of breakfasts and french toast dinners. We'd always have extra too.

Well, an added bonus to the house Pat and I bought last year was several sugar maple trees. So of course I had to carve out those sugar making memories from over a decade ago and tap the trees. The first tree I tapped in February was what I kind-of thought was a sugar maple - it turned out it was some other maple - probably red. The test syrup was not good at all and I haven't done anything with the remaining sap. But, I knew I had at least four other trees on or near the property that were sugar maples (you can tell from the branches and bark) that I would tap. I decided only to tap the larger of the two trees - they were about 14 inches in diameter each - plenty large enough for at least one tap.

So...Pat and I drilled one hole in each sometime in the first week of March, hung the collection buckets (courtesy of our friend Kristina's parents) and started boiling it down shortly thereafter. In order to get optimal sap flow, you need cold - sub 30 degree temperatures, and days in the 40's. We had that for a good stretch this March and ended up with about 25 gallons of sap. To date, we've boiled down about 18 of those gallons on an outdoor fire pit I built out of cinder blocks and steel crossbars. We also had plenty of pine we found on the sides of local roads (and Brookline) and used that as fuel.

After three nights of three hour boiling sessions, we ended up with about a gallon of sugary water. From there, the operation heading inside and the filtering and refining happened.

We ended up with about two and a half pints of really nice maple syrup - enough to last Pat ad I most of the year. Next year I'll probably tap the other two trees and expand the operation a bit to get a bit more. All and all, it was worth the effort - fun to do it again and taste it again.