so this video is gonna give you everything you need to know how to make
maple syrup but unfortunately we just had a blizzard and it's really windy so
I gotta take you to a better point ah okay so today I'm gonna explain to you
guys how I make my maple syrup and I'm gonna talk you through the process from
end to end
maple trees are those common trees that have the palm shaped leaves they're
abundant here especially come on you can't add all sorts of different maple
trees but what works best as if you're tapping the sugar maple tree the sugar
maple tree its SAP has the highest level of sugar concentrated in it so it only
takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup so step one
for you is to really recognize and identify your trees the easy way to do
it is do it when weather is nice and there's leaves it's easy to recognize
and identify a maple leaf I mean just think of the Canadian flag and boom
there you go you got your symbol right there this should be fine
now the time of year that you tap the maple trees is really important you
don't want to do it in the dead of winter you don't want to do it too late
in the spring the perfect scenario for collecting sap from a maple tree is to
find those days where they're above freezing but then at night it drops
below that you know 32 degree mark and if things freeze again because what
happens is when it freezes the tree makes sure that its sap stays below
ground but when the weather warms up the SAP shoots up the tree and starts
running into all the branches and all across the wood so what happens when
we're tapping is we're essentially creating a little hole that some of that
SAP is gonna leak out all it takes is a drill and a little spigot type thing
known as a Spile and boom you can just drill the hole take the Spile bang it in
there and you're ready to go you're gonna want
to attach a bucket so that you can catch the SAP and you'll probably want to
cover that bucket so water or snow or sediment or you know bird poop doesn't
end up in your SAP bucket but it's okay because when you do get ready to cook
you're gonna drain and strain that anyway collection of SAP is a pretty
easy and straightforward process you basically just go and check your buckets
every day or two because I don't have a tractor or heavy equipment to move the
SAP around I will store my SAP in just a standard five-gallon food grade safe
bucket it's important to have the food grade safe buckets if you use like just
your traditional like you know Home Depot orange bucket type of deal that
has plastics that can degrade and you don't want that I prefer the metal
buckets though on the trees because I've had bad luck where cold temperatures and
plastic and freezing and unfreezing SAP can just crack the buckets and you don't
want that I'm gonna have to deal with that when you collect your SAP it's
important to keep it cool you don't want to leave it out in the Sun you also
don't want to hang on to the set for too long and the rule of thumb I found is
just only wait one week before boiling it down that stuff can go rancid
probably the hardest part about making maple syrup is the evaporation process
it's not extremely hard but there are some things that make it harder there's
some things that make it easier and if you do it a smart way it's not that big
a deal you have a whole bunch of water that's very diluted and it's got a very
very small amount of sugar concentrated in it and what you're gonna want to do
is cook off most of that water one thing I would strongly recommend
against doing is do not cook it inside your house because you're gonna be
releasing so much water if you are doing your main boil inside your house you run
the risk of like peeling your wallpaper off with the amount of humidity that
you're gonna create in your kitchen and so you've got to be really careful about
that so I strongly strongly recommend that you do the majority of cooking your
maple syrup outside and when you do it do it on an evaporator I remember the
first year that I made maple syrup I had like just a standard propane burner
hooked up to a propane tank and I took a giant stockpot and put it on top of
there and when I tried to cook it that way it took hours and hours and hours
and I ended up going through almost two tanks of propane so when you think about
that right that's not very cost-effective it's not fuel efficient
that stockpot it has very little surface area so there's very little room for the
SAP to evaporate off of what's easier is if you have a large sort of flat pan
that has a lot of surface area that's gonna allow much more of the SAP to boil
off and it's gonna happen much more quickly you're gonna use your fuel more
efficiently for this year what I did was I actually built a very very cheap
cinder block evaporator both with the cost of the cinder blocks and the cost
of the pans that I used to evaporate it only cost me about 50 bucks in total and
so that's what I would say is probably maybe the bit most basic type of outdoor
evaporator you can build you can get really fancy though there's expensive
units that you can buy for thousands of dollars and my buddy Alfred actually
made this amazing brick evaporator he's a Mason so he has that
inhalants he can do gallons and gallons in the matter of an hour to the quality
of your evaporator will affect your cooking time but you want to leave
several hours for that cooking because it'll take a little while
one trick with feeding fires particularly if you're trying to get it
hot for maple syrup production I find it's easier to break up the wood and
have nice like sort of tiny thin kindling sized pieces that you're using
versus using big thick logs the main reason for that is that the the surface
to volume ratio of the wood burns much hotter when there's more surface area
and so lots of smaller pieces or a log that's broken up and do a lot of smaller
pieces is gonna have a lot more surface area than one big thick log again that's
gonna speed up your heat that's gonna make it hotter that's gonna make you
cook quicker and so you know it's funny when you think about it right
I guess that's is that physics or chemistry I guess that's technically
physics you're using science yeah science once you start to get your SAP
boiled down and it starts to taste a little bit like maple syrup and you're
starting to get that nice brown color to it that's usually about the time that
you're gonna want to figure out a way to finish the serum I separate the overall
evaporation process from finishing because you know getting maple syrup
just right and getting it at the right temperature in the right consistency is
a very finicky process it doesn't take long to go from having SAP to burning
your maple syrup particularly where as you're cooking at a higher temperature
and so what I will usually do is once I get to that final stage where it's very
close to being maple syrup I'll pull it off with my larger evaporator and I'll
bring it inside and I'll cook the remainder of it down on my stove inside
the house this allows me to do two things number one I can use a candy
thermometer and that candy thermometer will let me gauge the temperature and to
get your syrup just right you want to actually hit
temperature and then number two because I've got a propane powered stove at the
house here I can just you know turn the heat down a little bit to just adjust
and get my temperatures just right in terms of cooking temperature now this is
an important one the line between SAP and maple syrup is
essentially 7 degrees above the boiling point of water at our altitude around
here usually that's 212 degrees but I usually like to test it because it can
change on a given day because of atmospheric pressure and a bunch of
other stuff that I don't understand and so usually what I will do is try to get
some water boiling you just test the thermometer and see at what temperature
does that water start to boil as the temperature of the SAP turning into
syrup concoction started to rise and watch it closer and closer and closer
not wanting it to get to a point where I'd burn now once you hit that 219
degree mark you are ready to go you have got yourself some hot maple syrup and
it's ready to come off the heat and what you'll want to do is probably strain it
once or twice because you're gonna still probably have a little bit of sediment
in the in the sap and you're gonna want to get that gunk out nobody likes gritty
pancakes you know and then you can throw it in a mason jar seal it on up and
there you have it that's how you have your own maple syrup I think the only
other last step is you should make yourself a batch of Pancakes get some
nice good batter going fry them up throw a little bit of pad of butter on top of
it and then drizzle all that maple syrup all over the place
and enjoy those pancakes and knowing how much hard work goes into making them
maple syrup don't be afraid to be generous with it you earned it you know
and as you're at the store and you're out there looking at you know different
types of syrup that you can buy you see Mrs Butterworth on one end
you know bottle of real Vermont maple syrup on another recognize that the
reason that one probably costs four or five times as much is because how much
work goes into it but then as you guys know too as you taste it there's no
taste quite like it and it's so it's totally worth it a special shout out and
thank you to my good buddy Pin-Bo I Pin-Bo the one who did the awesome
illustrations for this video you can see some a pin Bose artwork at yo pin bow
doodles on Instagram I'll leave a link down below so I hope you guys have
enjoyed this guide on how to make maple syrup let me show you some additional
resources if you want to learn more on making that evaporate or check out this
video or if you want to see how I tap freeze check out that video and don't
forget to subscribe to us here at Gold Shaw farm where we are building a farm
here in Vermont