We’ve had some crazy weather in Michigan, which means we have been able to do an early season maple syrup boil. For those of you that don’t know, my wife and I typically make our own maple syrup which last the year. We normally do about 2 to 3 boils which produces about a gallon and a half of syrup that we bottle and store. We eat pancakes one to two times per week and my wife puts maple syrup in her oatmeal everyday so it’s pretty cool that we can tap our trees and create a product we use year round.
We would not tap our trees until late February or early March. However, maple sap starts running when the nights are below freezing and the days are in the mid 40s. We’ve had a string of warmer weather so we took a gamble and decided to put our taps in last week. We ended up getting about 35 to 40 gallons of sap last week so it was time for a boil.
Not only do we harvest own sap from our trees, but we use all of the fallen lumber to heat the evaporator. We have a DIY cinderblock evaporator that was extremely cost-efficient and easy to build. For less than 100 bucks you can get most of the supplies you need to make your own maple syrup.
A boil is an all day event. I started at about 830 this morning and by the time we’re done bottling it’ll be about 8 or 9 PM. It’s one of my favorite pastime because family members come over throughout the day to check out the operation and help stoke the fire, I could not beat the weather today as it started with a cool frosty morning and has turned into a beautiful sunny evening.
I’m currently waiting to get the sap up to about 218° on the fire so I can take it inside and finish it on the stove top. My wife has some bottles cleaned and she’ll get to sterilizing them right before we need to bottle. It also means as I get close to 218°, I get to have a beer since it’ll be around 5 o’clock when that happens! I thought it would be cool to share a little bit of the maple syrup process as it’s happening. Feel free to let me know if you guys have any questions since I love talking about our little operation.
