If you love maple syrup and have certain types of maple trees on your property, you can collect sap and make your own!
It's that time of year when winter is fading and the maple sap is flowing. Now is the time to tap your trees. You need the temperatures to be above freezing during the day and have it freezing during the nights. I've found temperatures in the upper 30's and low 40's during the day and 20's at night work best for the sap to flow. Before you even start anything you must have your supplies ordered first. You don't need much, just a food grade bucket, tubing, a tap, and a drill. I use five gallon buckets with holes drilled into the lids for the tubing and to keep bugs, debris, and water out. First find some maple trees, preferably sugar maples. The minimum diameter of a tree to use is 12 inches for one tap and you can add two taps to a tree that is 21 inches in diameter or larger. I don't recommend putting any more than two taps in a tree.
When you've found your tree use a drill with a 5/16 bit and drill into the tree about two inches deep at an upward angle so the sap flows downward from the hole. I tape a piece of tape at the two inch mark on my drill bit to make sure I didn't go too far into the tree. Next you insert your tap or spile (I used a tap) and gently tap the tap into the tree with a hammer. I then attached the tubing to the tap and put the other end of the tubing into the holes of the lid that I pre-drilled with the bucket firmly attached. Now it's just about waiting for the sap to come out and fill up the bucket.
You should collect your sap every day from your bucket. I put the sap in one-gallon water jugs that I had lying around the house. The sap needs to be out of sunlight and kept cool or it will spoil. If you don't boil the sap after a week it'll spoil and go bad. It takes forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup so I'd recommend tapping more than just one tree.
When boiling the sap, it's best to do it outside since a lot of steam will be generated boiling all that water off, unless of course you want to remove the wallpaper in your house. When boiling the sap use a large pot. When the sap is boiling, foam will develop on the top, so just skim it off and discard. When the sap starts taking on a golden color, it's time to transfer to a smaller pot. Once transferred to a smaller pot, the final boiling can be finished indoors on your stove. Keep boiling the sap until it takes on the consistency of syrup. Use a thermometer to check the sap, when the sap temperature is 7 degrees F above the boiling point of water then you've finished and now have maple syrup.
You're almost done, but there is probably a small amount of sediment in your syrup. I filtered it out by using cheese cloth. Pour the syrup in a sterilized bottle and cap and refrigerate. Depending on how sterilized everything was, your syrup should last for months.
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Re: DIY Maple Syrup Making
