How Sweet It Is! The Process of Making Maple Syrup

When the snow begins to melt and the sun starts gaining some strength, there is definitely something within me as well that comes alive. All I can think about is digging in the dirt, growing food, foraging the woods for nourishment, cleaning my surrounding, etc. Yes, that’s Spring and we are fully connected with the change of the seasons. The closer we live to the Earth, the more we feel it.

This Spring I decided on a whim that I wanted to try my hand at making maple syrup. I have been eating Paleo pretty much my whole life, but rather strictly since February of 2011. That is also how I feed my family. Since we don’t use sugar, we do use quite a bit of honey and maple syrup for homemade granola bars, granola, fruit desserts, etc. And so the adventure began.

I wanted to borrow some taps for maple trees since I didn’t know what I was getting myself into and whether I would ever want to make syrup again based on my first experience. Let’s just say that I will be purchasing some of my own taps for next season! A friend of mine loaned me five taps and my dad had three. My dad made maple syrup when he was a kid but not since then. They used to make their tree taps from sumac limbs and bases. I would love to try that sometime but it was already the beginning of the sap flow season when I decided to give this a try.

One of the first nice 50 degree days this early Spring, Dad, Draven and I headed to our woods, still tromping through about three feet of snow in some places in the woods. We took a hand drill, tree taps and our buckets. Once the first tap was in, it didn’t take Draven long to discover the sweet nourishment that a maple tree provides! While Dad and I drilled and tapped the rest of the trees, Draven stayed at tree #1, sucking down every last drop of sap.

Once the taps were in, we hung our buckets and waited! I think I ended up with about 50 gallons of sap this Spring from the trees we tapped, which was plenty for my first year experience.

Once I had enough sap, Draven and I strained it through a sheet into a 12 gallon stainless steel pot.

Then with team effort, Dan and I lugged the pot onto the stove.

The first batch took around 24 hours to boil down and we ended up with a little over a quart of syrup out of that batch. Once the syrup was cooked down to the correct thickness, I then strained it through cheesecloth into jars to separate out any sediment.

The ratio of sap to syrup is approximately 40 to 1. That’s A LOT of boiling sap for a precious amount of syrup. When all the sap was boiled down that I collected this Spring, we ended up with about 1 gallon plus 1 quart.

It was a fun process with a great feeling of accomplishment and self sufficiency once it was completed. It was also a great experience to share in the making of memories with my dad and Draven. I hope that my boys will always have fond memories of making maple syrup with their mom!