We’ve had some crazy weather in Michigan, which means we have been able to do an early season maple syrup boil. For those of you that don’t know, my wife and I typically make our own maple syrup which last the year. We normally do about 2 to 3 boils which produces about a gallon and a half of syrup that we bottle and store. We eat pancakes one to two times per week and my wife puts maple syrup in her oatmeal everyday so it’s pretty cool that we can tap our trees and create a product we use year round.
We would not tap our trees until late February or early March. However, maple sap starts running when the nights are below freezing and the days are in the mid 40s. We’ve had a string of warmer weather so we took a gamble and decided to put our taps in last week. We ended up getting about 35 to 40 gallons of sap last week so it was time for a boil.
Not only do we harvest own sap from our trees, but we use all of the fallen lumber to heat the evaporator. We have a DIY cinderblock evaporator that was extremely cost-efficient and easy to build. For less than 100 bucks you can get most of the supplies you need to make your own maple syrup.
A boil is an all day event. I started at about 830 this morning and by the time we’re done bottling it’ll be about 8 or 9 PM. It’s one of my favorite pastime because family members come over throughout the day to check out the operation and help stoke the fire, I could not beat the weather today as it started with a cool frosty morning and has turned into a beautiful sunny evening.
I’m currently waiting to get the sap up to about 218° on the fire so I can take it inside and finish it on the stove top. My wife has some bottles cleaned and she’ll get to sterilizing them right before we need to bottle. It also means as I get close to 218°, I get to have a beer since it’ll be around 5 o’clock when that happens! I thought it would be cool to share a little bit of the maple syrup process as it’s happening. Feel free to let me know if you guys have any questions since I love talking about our little operation.
Village people are very wise and thus we see that they have a solution to every problem as you are making syrub here with all these things.
Wow 218°, hope it is not really much
I grew up right around the corner from a nature center that has a sugar shack. It's quite the operation. My friend has quite a bit of land and he taps his trees each year. I like your homemade set up.
I feel like it's such a michigan thing I also grew up near a nature center than had a sugar shack and pancake breakfast. Thanks it's a cheap cider block setup that's pretty modular Ang get the job done.
No kidding about the Nature Center. That is cool. Ours is called Chippewa Nature center and my parents still live around the corner from it. I know Hartley is another big one over by St. Charles, but I don't know if they have a sugar shack. I should have looked into tapping our big maple tree in the years before I had them cut it down.
Fresh made maple syrup. I haven’t had any of that since I was in my 20’s. One of my friends his father owned a very small ski resort in Vermont. We used to go up and tap the trees for him. His employees would collect the buckets and he did the boil. He went deep amber on it. The stuff was so good. Way better than the crap they sell. No I really miss it……
It's so much better we have not had the fake stuff in years! It cool to see someone try to real stuff because it's pretty different than the dyed corn syrup most people are used too.
That's pretty cool. Enjoy your homemade syrup 😁
In the villages, the whole system is in this way and those people also work hard in the same way and make all the necessities of life by themselves in the same way and their health is also very good, all these things are pure
Quite the first time I will see the scenario where the tapping of tree is found
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Wow! Nice. Never knew the process and seeing this for the first time. The tree-tapping and boiling process looks pretty interesting and I bet quite delicious to taste.
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It is a hard working process, no easy to produce maple syrup