Maple Syrup Time

When my kids were little, they used maple sap for their science fair project. Marked the buckets with liter marks and tracked daily high and low temps and compared it to daily sap flow amounts. The goal was to find the optimum temperatures for sap flow. It got the whole family involved. Bribed the judges with free syrup, they got a really good grade.

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Your setup looks great. Anything made exclusively for tapping sap is silly expensive. Are those 5-7 gallon buckets or around?

Never done this before. Lots of stuff online says to collect sap daily, refrigerate, use within a week etc… how often do you fill up one of those buckets? If youre supposed to keep sap cool before boiling, is it fine to leave them outside for a week during 40/20 day/night climate?

I would love to give this a shot. I can source several food grade 5 gallons for free and have a half dozen 30+ year maple trees within a couple hundred feet of my house I could tap.

You can tap all sorts of trees. Black walnut is interesting in that its sap contains pectin so it will jelly when reduced enough

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Thats cool! I always think of juglone as being something to avoid so would never think of that. I have a very mature white walnut I could try to tap next to my house. I gottta scout all sorts of trees this spring, I dont have a great idea of whats in my woods yet.

I use brew buckets which are 5 to 7 gallons. They are just normal buckets with lids and some extra volume markings. I collect sap for a few weeks and store the extra in a large container in an unheated garage. If I know it’s going to get warm I start boiling. I’ve stored sap for 2 or 3 weeks with some of those days getting up in the 50’s. No issues. Some fermentation could occur in storage, but you will be boiling that sap for hours. Very little concerns about storing sap outside for many days. Commercial best practices are a little more exacting. Syrup is a pretty safe/sanitary product. I would recommend only trying maple trees at first. Boiling is such a long process, you probably won’t want to do multiple processes for different sap types.

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Thanks for the input. I want to get started this year so hopefully timing works out. Highs dont get up to the 50s until later in march so I think I will be able to let them sit for just under a week outdoors on the northern side of trees or maybe lightly insulated.

Yes boiling sounds like a pain- I am actually surprised to learn how much can be made from just a few trees. I dont really want to collect or process any more than 20-30 gallons of sap. 1/3-1/2 gallon of syrup is more than enough for personal use in my eyes.

Thanks for the vote of confidence.

If the collected sap partially freezes in your buckets, it should help to discard the ice (pure water) - that will leave the sugars more concentrated in the remainder.

That should help cut your time and energy to boil down the syrup.

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It’s that time of year again. We’ve had wild temperature swings so it’s been tough to judge when to tap. I think we guessed correctly, some trees filled up a 6 gallon bucket in 1.5 days. I only need them to fill up a bucket twice and that yields more than I need with plenty to give away. Boiling a batch today:

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