Anyone Tapping Trees for Syrup?

22 trees; all of them are maple, birch and walnut varieties. plus one sycamore!

locust? alder? any others? I grew up drinking birch beer and soda, it’s delicious. I wish I could grow birch here. even better than maple. I grow sorghum mostly just to chew on it, I don’t have enough space to grow enough to make syrup, though I love it.

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I’ve heard Boxelder makes a good syrup if you can find one big enough.

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Hilarious. What’s the source of this excellent tally sheet?

A coworker forwarded it to me, I’m not sure where he dug it up.

I tap 4 mature sugar maples. Because my trees are in a yard instead of the forest, my sap to syrup ratio is quite good, averages about 30:1. I boil in a steam table pan on a propane turkey fryer. The sap boils off at about 1.5 gal per hour, but if i preheat the sap in the house on the stove, i can do about 2 gal per hour. I do have to slow the process down as it gets close to syrup so that it doesn’t boil over or burn. I top up the pan with more sap about every half hour. So in a boiling day it takes a couple minutes of time every half hour and then about 2 hours of time to finish.

At 30:1 it takes about 4 gals of propane per gallon of syrup. If you have room and lots of firewood, building a cement block arch to support a couple steam table pans over a wood fire is a pretty economical way to try it out. Full size steam table pans are only about $30 each.

In my experience, small batch syrup is better than the stuff off the store shelf. And the taste changes over the syrup making season, so you get a variety of different flavors. Each different tree species should have it’s own unique taste as well. But anything other than maples will take a lot more boiling time.

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I’m thinking that there was an article published in POMONA or the NNGA proceedings, years back, comparing results of a taste test on syrups from various tree species… boxelder got higher marks, across the board, for flavor, over sugar maple. Butternut got more favorable reviews than black walnut.
I have way more trashy boxelders here than decent sugar maples…

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It’s been a while since this was breaking news, but UVM has been sorting out a production system for harvesting sap from small diameter trees. It looks very much like a mechanical milking system.

Seems it would be a really good fit for box elder given it’s growth habit. You could probably coppice it too to manage stem size and number, getting some useful wood/biomass out of the deal. It’s pretty soft, like red maple Id think. Lots of it in the floodplains here, not so much up on the hills where I am.

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Robert,

Back when I was a much younger man, we made maple syrup, 2 or 3 gals a year. It was fun the first few years but it’s a lot of work and the propane made it more expensive than store bought.

We did cook some down outside over a wood fire but it tasted smoky.

Maple trees flow when daytime temps are above freezing, but night temps are below. If both day and night temps are above or below, they stop flowing. Meaning warm day and night=> stop, cold day and night => stop. This means a lot of start and stop of boiling. Buckets and tubes get dirty during the down time, and must be washed. The end of the season the sap is off tasting, throw it out and call it over. . Careful not to mix a bad batch in to weeks of good product. Taste the sap before you boil, taste it along the way.

Boiling down has a few tricks; Boil each batch to approx 80-90 % done. Store in the frig. Once you have several batches making 4-5 gals, boil it to your finished product. But NEVER leave the pot, watch it closely! You use a thermometer and when it reaches XX degrees, you are done. Ten mins more you have candy! Two min more it is burnt!

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I burn fire in a stove whenever weather is cool enough to require house heat and it is going constantly during tapping season. I noticed one of my neighbors was tapping maples so I asked her if she’d like to make an exchange in which I would give her half the syrup I produced by leaving a pot on my stove, I keep a pot of water there anyway.

She and her partner were at the end of their enthusiasm for the project for the season so were happy to drop off about 45 gallons of sap. It didn’t come down to a lot of syrup, not more than a couple of quarts or so, so I suggested swapping some of my fruit instead, for which they were more enthusiastic- they had all the syrup they needed.

Without having to pay for fuel, the effort is almost worth it. I no longer resent the high prices for the stuff in markets.

With all the dead ash trees around, price of fuel needn’t be an issue.

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