Coronavirus Diaries – Sap to Syrup

The big day has arrived.  It’s not too windy, the sun is shining, and we have about five gallons on sap to boil.

We like to boil small batches at a time.  It will take about 4 hours of boiling for this amount of sap, but there really isn’t much to do during the bulk of this time.

You can see in the photo below that the sap is quite watery and light in colour, but this changes as we boil the sap down during the evaporation phase.

Making maple syrup

Once the amount in the big pot is reduced significantly, we transfer the reduced sap to a finishing pot.  It will be easier to monitor and we can also insert the thermometer without steam-burning our hands and having our glasses crust over with sugar vapours.

Making maple syrup

You can see how much darker the sap is by now.  A cautionary note: if you ever end up with sap that you would like to boil, do not try to do this indoors!  Your kitchen will be coated in sugar in no time!  This is potent stuff.

Making maple syrup

Back to boiling; now we need to pay close attention so that we don’t overcook our sap.  If you do overcook it you will end up with crystallized syrup.  Not a huge tragedy, as you can still make maple sugar, maple butter, or maple candy if this happens.

The rule of thumb is to boil the sap until it reaches 219°F, or 7°F above boiling.  Your boiling point changes based on elevation and air pressure. At sea level, water boils at 212 °F (100 °C). For every 500 ft increase in elevation, water’s boiling point is lowered by approximately 2.8°F (0.5 °C).  We use the thermometer to tell us when we reach this temperature, but we don’t rely solely on it.

Making maple syrup

The most certain way to tell when maple sap has become maple syrup is to measure the amount of sugar in the syrup with a hydrometer. When the sap reaches 66.9% sugar, it is then maple syrup.

Well, we don’t have one so we use a third method.

We use a more intuitive method, which worked for us over the years.  The sap becomes syrup when the bubbles change into small, dense bubbles.

Making maple syrup

Before boiling, we filtered the sap through cheesecloth to remove small twigs and other undesirables. Now we can go through another step to remove the sugar sand.  Sugar sand is not sand at all.  It’s the tiny sugar particles that resemble sand and may form a sedimentary layer at the bottom of your bottle.

Making maple syrup

We do this every time.  Start off filtering it through coffee filters,

Making maple syrup

but when it takes too long to go through the filter, we decide that we don’t really care about the sediments and abandon this step altogether.

Making maple syrup

This is much faster!

We collect bottles that look suitable for bottling the syrup.  This time we save a bottle of Jack Daniels and left a small amount of whiskey in it.  Lets see how this turns out.

Making maple syrup

So here we are with about 500ml of pure gold.  We should have a few more batches like this to make over the next week or two, but it will all depend on the weather.  Freezing nights and warmer, sunny days please!

Making maple syrup

Pancake dinner tonight!

34 thoughts on “Coronavirus Diaries – Sap to Syrup”

  4. petespringerauthor says:
    Reply

    Thanks for sharing. What an interesting process. It looks doable without a lot of impossible steps, though patience seems a virtue.

    • backroadsandotherstories says:
      Reply

      You are welcome! Maple syrup making is certainly doable and fairly easy. Depending on the method that use, it can be fairly hands free and low tech. Patience helps, but even that is not really a requirements because we don’t really think much about the sap dripping out of the tree while we go about our daily chores 🙂

  11. Rebecca says:
    Reply

    Congratulations! Funny as it sounds, I find this activity a “very Canadian” thing to do…but it certainly does yield delicious results. Enjoy your creation! 😛

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