The start of sugaring season for me!

Ended up with more syrup than I thought! I figured we ran around 275 gallons of sap through the evaporator all weekend (could have ran more, but I ran out of sap!) If anyway, pulled off around 8 gallons of syrup this evening, which equates to around 275 to 300the gallons boiled off, averaging around a 40 to 1ratio! I've got some sweet trees!! Here's a video right before we pulled the syrup off ......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9ZZARXfYYQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player

That is pretty neat! Do you sell the syrup? We could not use 8 gallons in a century! I use about a pint a year if that?? I would like to buy a small amount from you if that is possible.
I never knew how syrup was made!

Yes fellas I do love maple syrup, and once you start making it you figure out some really good ways to use it! For instance, one of my favorites is a tablespoon (or two) in an ice cold glass of milk (tastes like a melted vanilla milkshake, MMMMM!) I also cook down a gallon or two over the course of the year and make maple candy, its fantastic too! Maple syrup is great on vanilla ice cream with some crushed walnuts. We also cooked some down to sugar this past winter and my lovely wife made lots of different Christmas cookies with it (substituted the maple sugar for cane sugar). And there's the breakfast factor, nothing like maple syrup and buttermilk pancakes. I do give a lot of it away to family and friends, so if I end up with a decent amount this season I'll make sure to let you guys know first......

dang Scott, now I'm hungry!! I bet that stuff smells great!

Awesome- love the evaporator

thanks AP....I'm going to do some more refinements to it for next season as each year I want to get more and more production. I plan on building a single dampened flue, running a sap preeheater coil out of stainless steel 1/4" tubing INSIDE the flue, also making a cooking griddle on the side of the 'vap so we can be making sausage and pancakes right alongside the syrup! The evaporator will also be housed under roof on the side of my YET-TO-BE-BUILT woodshed, out of the weather. All that heat will help the wood season a little faster!..... :lol:

Magic Heat!

YOU GOT IT!! :coolsmirk:

Bob it does smell great! Drives the neighbors nuts, the whole darn neighborhood smells like syrup!

Scotty thanks for sharing the videos, very cool!
Have been on tours in the Blue Hills (Milton MA)
and saw the boil down process. The entire Maple Syrup
making process made me understand why real
maple syrup is so expensive.

Scotty, I want to do this. I don't have any sugar maple trees, but I do have 2 mature silver maple trees in my backyard. I've found that Silver Maple isn't the ideal tree to tap (less than Sugar Maples 2% and the presence of cloudy sap) but nevertheless I want to do it. Would you tap a silver if you didn't have a maple? Any tips/info. for me? Thanks.

That should have read, "Would you tap a silver if you didn't have a sugar"?