Our first attempt at tapping and cooking down sap for syrup

This year I decided it was time to learn to tap our trees on the farm for syrup. The inspiration for doing this was twofold; the first was from a recent trip to Vermont while visiting family and driving by the many “sugar shacks” and wanting to do the same back home and the second reason was having a local farmer hand me a tap last year to test tapping a box elder tree.  Understanding the type of trees you can tap and how to tap a tree for syrup is an important start. Let’s start with identifying the soft maples:

Bigleaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum) Comparing sizes of a human hand and a bigleaf maple leaf. Photo by Joe Nicholson, Nature photographer, Bugwood.org.

Box Elder (Acer negundo) https://www.extension.iastate.edu/forestry/iowa_trees/trees/boxelder.html

Red Maple (Acer rubrum) http://www.equmed.com/?p=314

Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) http://www.untamedscience.com/biodiversity/silver-maple/

 http://www.untamedscience.com/biodiversity/silver-maple/

Striped Maple (Acer pensylvanicum) http://www.hubbardbrook.org/image_library/view.php?id=422

The two types of hard maples are the sugar maple (saccharum) and the black maple (nigrum).

Sugar maple compared to the red maple and silver maple. http://uptreeid.com/Species/maples.htm

Black maple http://fineartamerica.com/featured/black-maple-al-bourassa.htmlption

Being a novice at the art of tapping a tree for its sap I needed to do some research on just exactly how does one go about tapping a tree for its sap?  Through several websites I found enough information on what I needed to do and when I needed to start tapping our trees. 

“Generally the sap starts to flow between mid-February and mid-March. The exact time of year depends upon where you live and weather conditions. Sap flows when daytime temperatures rise above freezing (32 degrees Fahrenheit / 0 Celsius) and nighttime temperatures fall below freezing. The rising temperature creates pressure in the tree generating the sap flow. This is basically a transfer of the sap from the tree above the ground and the root system below the ground. The sap generally flows for 4 to 6 weeks, with the best sap produced early on in the sap-flowing season.” http://www.tapmytrees.com/taptree.html

The first tree we tapped was a box elder; the box elder didn’t produce a huge amount of sap but Sara and I both thought the flavor was absolutely tasty! It had butterscotch like flavor and when eaten with pancakes it was, well, to die for!  Unfortunately we did not get a lot of the sap and therefore we did not end up with a lot of syrup.

The next tree we tapped was a nearby silver maple.  Now this tree produced a lot of sap and it is this tree that I shot a number of short videos cooking down the sap.  Our final reduction of sap ended up giving us about 3 quarts of syrup.  Some of the characteristics of the silver maple were light in maple flavor but rich in amber color and despite lacking in the maple flavor it was quite good.  You can view the cooking process by clicking on the link below.

Amber Syrup from our silver maple

To see the video on our first attempt at syrup cooking click on the link below.

https://youtu.be/bxBUGj98nos