Making Maple Syrup

 

It all started very innocently over 35 years ago when my friend, Fred, inherited some property in central Indiana from his father.  As Fred and I were walking the property, I mentioned that he had a number of hard maple trees and that perhaps we should consider tapping the trees to make maple syrup.  Several years later, after Fred and his wife had built a house on the property, the subject came up again. Fred had fond memories of making maple syrup as a child at school in Indianapolis, and so we decided to give it a try.

 

We started with 10 taps.  I had an engineer friend, who worked at a sheet metal shop, put together a pan.  We stacked up four columns of bricks, set the pan on top and started a fire under it.  It was a very crude operation.  We liked the experience.  We liked having a reason to be outside during February and March.  And we liked the wonderful taste of our own maple syrup.  But it was apparent that we needed to make some improvements.  Thus began 32 years of improving our maple syrup operation.

 

Two of the first things we did were to have two metal U shaped frames welded up that we could hammer into the ground to rest the boiling pan on.  This gave us a chance to get the pan level.  Then we fashioned some awnings of cement asbestos board to hang down from the pan to better contain the fire on two sides.

 

Over time we added more taps, more pans and another friend, Courtenay, to help us. He had experience with ceramic bricks and suggested that we make a real fireplace for our cooking. We were losing too much heat and splitting too much firewood, so we dug some holes and poured concrete to hold two lightweight lintels that would support dry, stacked ceramic brick.  We installed some scrap metal flooring for a grate, and we bought a length of metal chimney to help carry the smoke away.  We had a metal frame fabricated to set on top of the bricks to hold the pans.  This, along with some ceramic fiber, allowed us to further tighten the fireplace and to cut down on the smoke around the pans.

 

By 1991 we had a decent fireplace and two 20 gallon stainless steel pans, as well as a fourth friend, Don, to help.  All was going well until during that year, as we were pouring the nearly finished sap from one pan to the other, nearing completion of the boil, the sap began to boil over and catch fire.  Since we had no handles on the pans, we were not able to lift them off of the fire. Instead of getting approximately four gallons of syrup, we got 1 ½ gallons and two hard-to-clean pans.  Within a week we added handles to our pans.

 

In 1994 we added a new dimension to our maple syrup endeavors.  Up to this point the maple syrup endeavor was a guy thing.  We decided to have a maple syrup kick-off dinner at the start of the season, inviting our wives to help with the cooking.  The requirement: each item on the menu had to include maple syrup.  The dinner was such a success that we have continued it every year. The menus continue to get better and better, and we have a stock of great recipes for cooking with maple syrup.

 

Improvement of our processes continued also. It became obvious that the expanded metal flooring was not adequate for a grate.  The fire was so hot that the grate sagged. After several times of inverting the grate before the next boil, we replaced it with some cast iron grating from a driveway drain.  This worked fine until we decided to add a third, large evaporation pan and needed to expand the fireplace once more with no more access to scrap cast iron grating.

 

In 1996 we added to the fireplace and actually had the bricks mortared in place.  We expanded the chimney size to get a better draw.  We had a local aircraft engine manufacturer weld up some grates from scrap titanium (OK, that may be a bit over the top, but it really works!). And we continue to increase the number of taps.  We now had 66 taps and three pans holding a total of 50 gallons.  We also got into the habit of covering our wood piles with tarps and plastic so that the wood was dry and burned better when we needed it.

 

There have been numerous small improvements over the intervening years.  We recently had our fireplace rebuilt, and we cover it whenever we are not using it to keep the weather from affecting it. The outside operation is in good shape!

 

One of the most difficult aspects of making maple syrup, however, is filtering the sap prior to putting it into canning jars.  We are still mastering this part of the operation.  We know that more filtering is better, but this is a rather slow and arduous process.  We have added a stand to hang the filters so we no longer have to kneel on the floor for long periods of time. Why not the sink?  Because the sink is full of dirty filters and pots and the filter opening would be too high to see what we are doing. Obviously there is ample room for improvement in this area.

 

This year we put in 85 taps.  We gathered 856 gallons of sap and produced 20.5 gallons of syrup.  That results in 1 gallon of syrup per 41.75 gallons of sap—a very good ratio.  In our early days of making maple syrup, we many times would only get one gallon of syrup per 50 or more gallons of sap.  Either we are getting better or global warming is changing the sugar ratio of our trees.

 

This process of making maple syrup has been a labor of love.  We always joke about how much each quart of maple syrup really costs if we would add all of our investments and time.  But each year we all look forward to someone initiating the January phone call or email saying, “I believe the maple syrup dinner will be at our house this year, can you make it on Saturday night?”  And then there is the camaraderie and the delicious maple syrup, which we enjoy using in so many great recipes and sharing with friends and family.

 

We are already thinking about ways we can improve next year.