Dear Stump:
I have always wanted to know about harvesting sap and making syrup from my maple trees. What can you tell me about managing trees for maple syrup production, collecting sap, and turning sap into syrup? Thanks!
Tapping your trees and making your own maple syrup can be a hobby or a business that you enjoy and share with your family and friends. Let me start by differentiating between a business and a hobby. The Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection regulates the production and sale of maple syrup. If you are only interested in making syrup for family and friends then you are not required to be licensed by DATCP. However, if you are interested in selling the syrup you make you may need to apply for a food processing plant license. Either way, you should become familiar with the rules for grading and labeling your honey.
So, what trees make the best syrup? Sugar maples are the most productive trees. They have a higher sugar content and they yield higher rates of syrup for every gallon of sap collected. That doesn’t mean it is the only tree you can tap to make syrup. All of the trees in the maple family can be tapped for syrup; sugar maple, red maple, silver maple, and even Boxelder if you have a mind to try it. Birch trees can also be tapped and the sap boiled to make syrup. You need to understand though that the amount of sap you need to collect to create a gallon of syrup increases dramatically as the sugar content of the sap decreases. Sugar maples are often considered the best because their sap has the highest sugar content. Also, sugar maples tend to have the longest “sap run” in the spring so these things combined makes sugar maple the favorite tree for syrup production.
When can you start “tapping” trees? This is one of the things that makes real maple syrup so special. The sap in a maple tree that can be collected to produce syrup occurs for only a very short period of time in late winter to early spring. As daytime temperatures start to warm into the upper 30′s and low 40′s the sugars that were stored by the tree as a starch in the fall begin to convert back into sugars and flow in the sap. Days when temperatures warm up to around 40°during the day and fall back to below freezing at night provide ideal conditions for sap collection. Once temperatures start to consistently rise to above 45° and stay above freezing at night is when these starches stop converting to sugars and the sap collecting season is at an end.
How do you collect sap? First let’s start with how many holes you can drill into a tree to collect sap. I have seen a lot of different numbers but they are all fairly similar. First and foremost, the number of tapholes a tree can support depends on its diameter at breast height, its health, and its vigor. You don’t want to tap a tree that is less than 10 inches in diameter and you should avoid tapping trees that have obvious stem defects or crowns that are small or in poor condition. Trees that range from 10 to 18 inches in diameter can handle one tap, trees that range from 19 to 25 inches in diameter can handle two taps, trees larger than 26 inches in diameter can handle three taps. Tapholes should be placed evenly around the tree and are usually located about three feet above the ground or whatever height is most convenient for the person who will be collecting the sap.
The holes themselves are dependent on the the type of tap or spile you use. Ideally, you should select your tap based on how you want to collect the sap. Sap can be collected using a covered bucket, a sap holder and bag system, or a system of hoses that feed into a collection point. Some spout are designed with hooks to hold a bag or bucket in place while others are designed to feed line systems. Make sure you are buying the type of tap that will work with the system that you want to install. You should plan to collect your sap on a regular basis and process it into syrup as soon as possible. Sap that is left in the woods can spoil quickly in warm weather. It is important to remember that sap flow depends on weather and it will not be consistent.
The next step is to filter the sap you have collected to remove dirt, grit, or debris that might have gotten mixed into the sap. You can purchase commercial sap filters or filter it through cheesecloth. Once this is done you can boil your sap. Many folks have learned the hard way that it is best to do this in a space set aside for this purpose. You will boil off an incredible amount of water to get your sap to syrup. It take somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 gallons of sap to create one gallon of syrup with a sugar concentration of 66 percent. I know more than a few folks who have unintentionally steamed the wallpaper off their kitchen walls doing this. The key thing about boiling sap down is a constant, even heat source and constant attention to the sap as you boil it down to syrup. The actual process is complex and I recommend that you refer to one of the publications listed above or purchase a copy of the North American Maple Syrup Producers Manual: Second Edition, often referred to colloquially as “the bible.” This 329-page manual describes all aspects of maple product production from sugarbush management to marketing. The manual is a product of Ohio State University Extension and can be purchased online at The Ohio State University Extension eStore
There are many fun and exciting projects that you can do in the woods with your family and this is certainly one of them and the outcome is a product that you can enjoy the rest of the year until it comes time to do it all over again. As with all hobbies that one may become especially addictive, in more ways than one, and you may find that your hobby may become an investment in land and equipment as you produce maple syrup for friends, family, and profit.