Maine Maple Sunday Weekend!

It’s Maine Maple Sunday Weekend! Every year on the last weekend of March most of the maple syrup producers here in Maine do an open house event. You can see their evaporators in action, they’ll give you short demos and describe the cooking process, and there’s plenty of maple syrup to go around.

Well, this year I decided to tap a few trees on my property and give it a go myself. Why not, right? So after a few weeks I had about fifteen gallons of sap. That was from three trees that I am absolutely certain are maples and a fourth that I think might be an ash….but….eh throw it all in together.

Evaporator time! Well, I don’t have the monies to buy even one of the diy hobbyest evaporators. But I do have like two dozen cinder blocks laying around.

Redneck evaporator

Look what I have created! I…have made fire!

I found a few roasting pans cheap at the local overstock/reclaim/whathaveyou store. Not quite deep enough for what I wanted, but they worked. The plan was to have all three boiling so I could get through the sap quick. I didn’t really want to be out all day and into the night.

Boiled tree blood, my favorite!

What I quickly discovered, however, was my design had a pretty nasty flaw. Well, two flaws but we’ll chat about the second one in a bit. Flaw A is I was only allowing airflow in one side and one side only.

This is okay for the most part, but as the fresh air was being pulled in, it was pushing the hot air to the back where flaw B was missing. So the pan in front at the entrance was heating but not boiling, the second pan was just barely hitting boiling, and the last pan was a rolling boil for the most part. What I didn’t know was this was a blessing in disguise. See, part of what I was concerned about was heating the liquid so I didn’t kill the boil. It takes a lot of energy to move water even a few degrees, and I really did not want to go through all the fuel I had brought quickly.

A note on that…I used a sawdust brick a local company makes with their waste sawdust. It’s air pressurized compacted into a puck roughly the size of two hocky pucks together. You can see the remnants of them in the above photo. They burn fast and hot but they leave an absolute load of ash behind and almost no coals. Coals is where the heat is at. These things are great for fireboxes and wood stoves, but I was constantly feeding them to this particular fire. Later, I gave up and went in to get my cutoffs from my woodworking projects. I normally save most of them, but this was an emergency. They kept the fire going long enough to finish. But we’re jumping ahead.

Boiling and toiling

That color variation isn’t the pans…it’s the sap cooking away. You can see here what I mean even in a still image…the pan on the far left has a good boil whereas the one at the right is just steaming. Now’s a good time to talk about design flaw B.

Note the specks in the pan on the right. You can’t tell, but that’s in all the pans. That’s wood ash. See, as the air pulls from the front, it spits out the only place it can…directly behind the last pan. And it brings all the debris with it. And since I do not have a chimney, that debris is free to go wherever it pleases. And that happens to mostly be in my liquid gold here. The good news is a lot of it gets caught in the foam and I can skim it out. The better news is I have two filter passes I have to make and it’s not going to make it past either.

So how do I fix both issues? Well, the chimney issue is easy…make a chimney. I can V two layers of blocks and then set two on their side creating a flue of a sort. That will pull all the smoke and ash up and out, and if I’m super smart I can put another block on top to direct it away from the pans. The entry issue…well, not much I can do for feeding fuel, but feeding air is as simple as setting the two bottom middle blocks on their side, which will allow a lot more air to come into the center area. But as I said, it’s not actually an issue at all, and it benefitted me more than hurt me. By having the end pan just be a warmer, I could feed the last pan with the partial boil from the middle pan, then feed the middle pan with the heated liquid from the first pan. That way everything stayed up to temp.

Eventually, I ran out of liquid, so I moved to two pans, and then one. Fifteen gallons of tree blood into one small pan of boiling near syrup.

Super delicious tree blood

There you can see me having thrown my cutoffs in to get the boil going again. It was losing heat quickly, the bricks just weren’t working, so a whole mess of pine scraps to save the day. This is the part that I found the most annoying. See, according to the guide in the kit I bought, you want to pull the now almost syrup off the heat when it hits 216F and run it through it’s second filter (first filter is from bucket to pans, which I actually did while collecting throughout the weeks). But that takes for-……-EVER. Water boils right around 210F in my location. Sap is mostly water. Even this condensed it was still primarily water. Super sweet delicious water, but still water. Also you’ll note the very much dark color. That’s actually not the syrup….it’s a layer of black soot ash riding on the syrup. Don’t worry, I get rid of it. The ash, not the syrup. Eventually, after what I believe was another full hour, the thermometer you don’t see me using here finally crept up past the 210F mark.

Nearly there now

It took forever, but it hit 215F and that was plenty enough for me. Pulling the pan to the other side where there was barely any heat, I let it cool and prepped my filter. I estimated I had around 50 US fluid ounces here, which my little pot there would more than adequately handle. Now here’s a part I laugh about. The book clearly stated to NOT use coffee filters to filter your syrup. It said, rightly so, that the weaving was too tight to allow the syrup to flow through easily. What does that look like to you? A coffee filter, yes? That’s the filter that came with the kit. It is absolutely a filter for slow drip coffee. Most the syrup did flow through, save about a cup’s worth which I had to run inside and grab a pair of tongs to squeeze through. That was my secondary filter. I still had the tertiary to do, and I was not looking forward to that.

Ma! Tree-blood’s done!

I’ll spare the break down. I have three incredibly sooty and sticky pans outside that I think I might throw in the creek to wash instead of trying to wash inside. Everything else came inside and went into the sink with plenty of hot water. The pot went on the stove and while I wasn’t looking boiled over leaving a massive sticky mess everywhere. I lost maybe half a cup to a cup to that mess. Watch your boils, folks. Hence the saucespan. The goal is to hit 219F. Then you’re suppose to check the sugar level and boil more if needbe but I cannot possibly be bothered to do that for what is about a quart of syrup so I just let it go until it hit just before the 220F mark here. Then it was the tertiary filter….

THAT IS A COFFEE FILTER!

This is hot liquid just off the stove. It’s bound up. I know it’s a still image, but what you see streaming on the bottom is what’s coming from near the top. Everything where you see syrup? That’s just sitting there. These filters are way too fine mesh. I’ll do a cheesecloth filter next year. Tongs again got most of it out, and what was left wasn’t worth saving. Which leaves us off at the final bit. The moment all wait for.

Freshly squeezed tree

All the tree blood joking aside, this doesn’t hurt the three at all. It is a very small hole that is drilled only about two inches into the tree. The taps are taken out before budding and the hole heals over and after a few years you’ll be hard pressed to find where it ever was. The amount of liquid we take from the tree is miniscule compared to just how much water it’s pulling from the ground. Tappers also realize you can’t tap trees too small, nor can you put more than two or three taps in a tree even when it’s huge. It’s a very sustainable industry, and so long as you respect the tree, it’ll live long past you. And produce amazingly good syrup year after year.

I got just about 1.25 quarts. A little under what I had estimated. I think some of that was lost to my overboil. It was a long process, too. It took around seven hours just for fifteen gallons of sap. Commercial producers are up before the sun boiling this down and don’t stop until they have trouble staying upright. I’ve nothing but respect for them. I think anyone who has access to some maples should give this a try at least once. If nothing else, you’ll appreciate more WHY maple syrup is so expensive.

I was tasting the foam as I skimmed it, and knew this was going to be pretty sweet syrup. I tried a little before the last boil and it is incredible. It’s maple, but it also has something else which I assume is my mystery tree adding a bit of flavor. I couldn’t be bothered to get a reading on the sugar content, maybe I’ll buy the proper equipment to do so next year. It was a fun experience.

It’s taken long enough to write this entry for the syrup to be cool enough to taste. It has the syrup consistency. So good marks for me there. Its flavor is…interesting. It doesn’t have a maple flavor like you’d expect. I’m thinking it maybe indeed be due to mixing tree saps. It is not an unpleasant flavor. It’s an unexpected flavor. I can’t really place it, nor describe it. Buttery maybe. I guess I’ll need to pay attention to when the trees leave up and see if I may have included some ash or beech into the mix or something. So I don’t think I can call it maple syrup. I kinda feel a bit of disappointment about that and I don’t know why. Like, I didn’t fail at all, but it’s not super strong maple tasting syrup. But it’s also not bad. It’s ridiculously sweet. Yea, I’m going to need to a) ID those trees and b) tag the ones I want to tap next year for sure.

Now, as I smell of wood smoke through and through, I think I need to fix that. And break down my redneck evaporator. There’s a ton of wood ash I gotta figure something to do with. But I’ve syrup and Maple Weekend is only half over. Tomorrow I can head out and support one of the local producers. Assuming the 3-5 inches of snow forecasted is a miss.