Maple Syrup Boiling Process

Once we tap the trees, then we collect the sap, once we get maybe a couple gallons in a bucket. And then we’ll drive out there with a tank on a trailer and load the sap into that and come back here. So then it’s time to start the boiling process of turning sap into syrup. And the way we have it set up, is we feed the sap in from the large tank through some pipes and it’s a gravity feed system.And so that gravity system keeps the sap full, and as it moves through and evaporates off and the depth starts to go down, the float valve opens and allows more sap to come in. So, we just keep the fire going. We can boil a couple hundred gallons of sap down in a day. Once we get it to a fairly high sugar content, we can draw it off through the pipe here and take it off the pan and then work on the next step of finishing it and turning it into syrup. Once we finish up with the big evaporator, and we draw off the solution that may be 40% sugar or something around there. Then we’re going to cart it over, and this is what we call the finishing evaporator, the finish boil. And so the idea here is that we have a bit more control over the temperature and the amount of evaporation that is coming off. And so when we get it up to the target sugar content we can stop it pretty quickly. And so, in this process, we’ll check continually in terms of the sugar content. And once we get it up to 66%, we’ll stop it, and it’s time to filter it once again and then do the bottling process. And then we want to hot pack the syrup in the bottles, and so we want to get the syrup into the bottles as quickly as possible. So we’re going to do that right away, we’re going to fill the bottles and then we’re going to let them cool. And they should, at that point, be able to keep for quite a while.