Giving Backyard Maple Sugaring a Try
We’ve lived in New England all our lives, but I’m ashamed to admit we’ve never tried maple sugaring ourselves until now. We have several family friends that own large-scale sugar shacks so we’re familiar with the process and had some great resources to ask questions. We kept it very small scale and simple, but you can get more technical with the process to make really consistent, great maple syrup. If you want to try this at home, I’d recommend doing your own research first to make sure your syrup is made safely and well. | This post contains affiliate links |
I didn’t take too many photos of the process but we started by tapping the trees. We drilled into sugar maples at a slight upward angle so the sap will drip out, tapped in special metal spigots (also called spiles) with hooks, and hung buckets to catch the sap. It's important to do this at the right time of year when the sap is running, usually late winter/early spring when the days are above freezing and the nights are cold.
Once we got a total of 5 gallons of sap, which only took a day or two, we started boiling. It’s a good idea to boil outside as it takes a while and makes a lot of steam and you probably don’t want that much moisture inside your house. We used a stainless steel pot on a propane stove ring in our driveway to boil. Once the liquid was reduced by half, we added more sap, and just kept boiling it down until it was a good color/consistency.
Serious maple sugar makers would reccomend you use a hydrometer to test the water content of your syrup to make sure it's at the right consistency. However, we totally just winged it and kept reducing until it looked pretty good. We prefer a lighter, more honey-tasting syrup so we didn't reduce it down to a dark amber syrup.
It takes a lot of sap to make a little syrup. We boiled down about 3+ gallons of sap to get the maple syrup you see in the jar. It takes a lot of work and a lot of time, but it was a fun experience for the kids and now we get to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Mmmmm, pancakes!
Disclaimer: This was a very quick overview on the process we did to make maple syrup. If you decide you would like to give it a try, I recommend researching it on your own and asking an experienced producer for advice before starting.