Tapping a Maple Tree

You need a drill. You'll need a hammer. You'll need some taps to collect the sap out of the tree, and you need some kind of food-safe container to gather your sap in. You might have something like this. You might use an old water jug or an old well-rinsed milk jug. You can get a nice bucket from a maple dealer, and that's a handy thing to have, too. Now, you'll also need to know that your tree is big enough to tap. I don't think we have to worry about that here, but you want a tree, before you ever tap it, it should be at least 10 to 12 inches in diameter at chest height. As soon as it's 10, you can put one tap in it. Up to 20, should have one tap. Between 20 and 24, you can put in two taps. If the tree is more than 24 inches in diameter, you can put in three if the tree is healthy. To tap the tree, you need a portable drill, and you need a drill bit. You might be tempted to just run into the barn and get a drill that looks like it's the right size. Don't use a drill bit like this one. If you wouldn't eat off of this, then you shouldn't use it for making a food product. This is an old rusty drill bit. We're not going to use this one. OK, so we changed out the drill bits and got rid of that rusty one. We're using a nice, clean, sharp, new drill bit, and we marked the drill bit to show how far we're going to drill into the tree. If you're using a 5/16-inch spout or a smaller one, you'll only need to drill about an inch and a half. If you're using a 7/16-inch spout, you'll need to drill about two inches. You want to drill at a slight uphill angle so the sap will run out of the tree. If you don't have a rechargeable drill, you can use a brace and bit, and that works just as well. Notice that our tap hole that we're drilling here is at least six inches away from any other tap hole side to side, and it's no closer than two feet above or below an older tap hole. It's nice and clean. We'll clean it out with a twig to make sure that tap hole is nice and clean. We're not going to blow in it and get any germs in there that will seal the tap hole over. Now, we have our tap. This tap has a hook to hang our bucket on. We're going to put that into our tree. Then, they call this tapping for a reason. You're not going to wail away on this. If the tree is frozen and you hammer really hard, you have a chance of splitting the tree. There, you can see the sap is already coming out, so we're going to hang our bucket on the tree, like so. Because we don't want leaves and twigs and squirrel droppings and birds to put anything in our sap, we've put a cover on the sap as well. We're going to collect this sap, and then we're going to boil it down and make syrup out of it.