The weather has not been conducive for our maple trees to produce sap. I think it has been an odd combination of deep frost and an absence of nighttime temperatures below freezing. Maybe the trees are not quite as ready for spring as we are. Despite the slow run, I was able to gather about 22 gallons of sap this week, enough for a first attempt at making maple syrup with our new setup.
This year, I made three changes to my syrup-making process. The first was to build a dedicated barrel stove to boil the sap. Last year I used a hotel pan over our firepit. It worked, but it was hard to keep a constant boil and it took a long time. My barrel stove has room for two hotel pans, doubling the volume I can boil. The stove is insulated with firebrick and ceramic blanket, so it burns and heats more efficiently than the firepit. I wound copper tubing around the smokestack, set my homebrewing bottling bucket, which has a spigot, on a ladder, and used a funnel to slowly feed sap through the tubing and into a pan on the stove. The heat in the smokestack transfers to the copper, heating the sap before it enters the pan so the boiling does not stop. I adjusted the spigot so the feed rate was close to the evaporation rate to keep the pan from overfilling. All of this made boiling the sap much more enjoyable. I just had to periodically add wood to the stove and sap to the bucket, and relax in a comfortable chair in the sunshine with the dog. It took about 6-1/2 hours to boil down 22 gallons of sap, an evaporation rate of about 3.6 gallons per hour. When the sap was nearly boiled down, I filtered it into a stockpot to have more control over the final boiling.
The second change was to have an actual kitchen. At this time last year, we had just installed the countertops and sink in our kitchen. There was no stove, so I finished the sap on a camp stove and heated the jars on a turkey fryer. I also had to get everything done before the sun set, so there was little time for a break. This year, we have a finished kitchen with a new gas stove. Once the almost-syrup was in the pot, I was able to bring it inside, go to dinner with Maggie, and then finish up. The canning pot heated up quickly, and the syrup reached its final boiling temperature in only 15 minutes.
The last change was in the bottling process. Last year, I filtered the syrup into a pitcher and then poured the syrup into hot canning jars. I needed to work quickly so the syrup did not cool and thicken, making pouring difficult. This year, I bought a 32-cup coffeemaker at Goodwill. The coffeemaker kept the syrup warm and flowable as it slowly drained through the filter. The spigot at the base of the coffeemaker made it easy to fill the canning jars.
It still took all day to make, in the end, three pints of maple syrup. But the improvements to the process made for a more relaxing day. I am not sure how much maple syrup we will produce this year, but if the weather for the other boiling days are as nice as this first day, it will be worth it.
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