Ah, maple.

It is clear that we will not get our usual spring excursion to a sugar bush to see the maple syrup in production and top up our supply. Sad, but necessary. Because of this, I have finally got around to posting the description of making maple syrup that I have been threatening to write for years. Two caveats. Those of you who know how it all works may find this overexplained. And for those of you who don’t, know that our operation was a small one. To see how the big guys do it, go to Wheelers, Fultons, Temples. And know that there are a lot of people who are just making syrup for themselves on all sorts of jerry-rigged boilers. We started with an iron kettle. But we grew.

Sunday was a gloriously sunny day, but cold. I understand that the syrup producers have been having a good year so far but expect that this weather will give them a day of rest. I looked forward a lot to cold days when we were boiling. A gift of time to take a hot shower, cook something to eat that wasn’t hand held food in the camp, and sleep. The ting about making maple syrup is that the weather sets your work schedule. It is not possible to put something off until tomorrow, mostly, because if you do you might never catch up. The biggest run we ever had, we boiled from when the lines thawed to when they froze up again, about twelve hours, and for three days we ended up with more sap in the tank when we dropped the boil than we had when we started.

 

All of this probably is somewhat mysterious to anyone who has never seen a sugar shack in operation. Our bush (stands of sugar maple trees) was almost all on slopes and so we were able to run the sap lines into two main lines and gravity pulled the sap into our holding tanks. Sap lines are arrangements of tubing that run from tree to tree, each maple tree having one or more spiles (a small spout inserted into a drilled hole in the tree trunk) dripping sap into the tubes. The tubes are then joined to a larger pipe called the main line. Holding tanks are large receptacles into which the sap pours from the main line.

Good sugaring weather occurs when there is a freeze of five or so degrees (Celsius) at night, and a rise in temperature to about five degrees through the day. This temperature variant ensures that the tree stops pumping sap at night and pulls it back into the trunk and branches during the day. If there is a properly drilled hole in the trunk, the sap runs out instead of going up all the way. The only problem is that if it freezes at night, the sap in the lines freezes since its sugar content is only about 3%. Morning becomes a waiting game because you need a good quantity of sap before you can start it boiling so that it condenses.

To make syrup you start with the sap at 3% sugar and boil it until it is 66.6% sugar. Huge amounts of water boil off as steam, giving the sugar shack its characteristic plume of steam shooting out of vents in the roof. The sugar maker keeps adding sap and syphoning off the condensed syrup. When the sap slows down or stops, you had better have enough left in the tanks to allow the partly finished stuff to cool down and not burn. This is a tricky operation. The sap is boiled, if you have any sense, in a dedicated evaporator. 

Sap is let in at one end, heat is applied underneath, and as the sap condenses it is pulled forward by the operator draining it off at the other end.  Especially if they are using a wood fire to boil the sap, many operators ‘take off’ the sap before it is quite thick enough, and ‘finish’ it in another pan, smaller, where the heat can be controlled better.

Our operation depended on a holding tank at a level above the evaporator so that the sap was pulled by gravity as needed. The choke point was the hose between this tank and the evaporator, because the sap in the hose would freeze at night when the temperature dropped. The rate of flow was also regulated by a float that was supposed to drop and cut off the flow if the pan was too deep, and raise and open the sap flow if the pan was too shallow. Adjusting the floats was the second trickiest job in the camp because if you got it wrong, you could burn the condensed sap or flood the pan and make yourself hours more work.

The trickiest job was determining when the syrup had reached its optimum density of 66.6% sugar. There are several ways of determining this. Simplest is to go by temperature. At a specific temperature, the sugar content ought to be correct. (I will have to look up that number. Once I knew it by heart.) So, a really good thermometer in the pan should tell you when the syrup is done. There are also dedicated instruments, a spectrometer for instance, that the commercial operators use. Again, tricky, as it involves smearing a drop of sap on a plate on the instrument and reading the result. Temperature of the instrument and the syrup is critical to get an exact reading. Also, there are the lifetime syrup makers who swear that they can tell when the syrup is done by pouring it out of a ladle and seeing how viscous it is. (As your mother judged fudge candy doneness the same way by dripping the product into cold water and looking for a ‘soft ball’.)

The sap coming out of the tree carries a bit of sediment with it and boiling it causes the sediment to form sand. No one wants their syrup to be gritty, so the sap is filtered going into the holding tank, coming off the evaporator and before it is put in containers. Unfortunately, if it is too thick, it will not filter. If it gets too cold, it will not filter. If the sediment is a certain type prevalent at the beginning of the season, it will not filter. The person in charge of filtering can be pretty frustrated. (That would have been me.)

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This is the operator, carefully adding selected wood, a mixture of hardwood and softwood usually, to keep a rolling boil going in the pans. Our rig had two pans. The rear one as shown here had a steam hood attached with sliding window openings to check what was going on. The 'front pan' had a suspended steam hood because it contained much thicker sap and needed constant checking. You did not want this pan to boil so hard that it boiled over and we kept a can of vegetable oil to spray if there was too much foam. Some old-fashioned sugar operations used a piece of pork fat haxnging above the pan, causing the syrup to be non-kosher.

Even with all the steam hoods, the building where the boiling took place smelled marvellous and the workers ended the day with a fine layer of sugar on their faces and clothing. But in my experience, no one, ever, got tired of eating the syrup.