How to Make Maple Syrup
Parts of this maple syrup article were originally on our other blog LiveDan330. We combined a few articles because making maple syrup fit so well into our Foraging Minnesota series. This article also has affiliate links.
This is a long article, and since Google tells me most readers attention span is only about a minute and a half long, I wanted to show you what is in the article below so you can jump to what you are looking for. I cover all the high points in making maple syrup including:
- making your own v. buying from a store
- maple syrup nutrition
- identifying a maple tree
- tapping trees
- boiling down the sap
- How to use maple syrup to substitute for brown sugar
Can’t I just buy my own Maple Syrup?
That answer depends on what you buy. The price for real maple syrup is expensive and the fake stuff is, well … super processed fake stuff. Truthfully, you probably don’t use so much syrup that the price really matters but the quality of the food we eat does. Let’s take a look at the “syrup” from the store.
Maple Syrup Nutrition
Let’s take a quick look at the back of the bottle in the fridge: “Ingredients: corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, water, contains less than 2% salt, cellulose gum, natural and artificial flavors, caramel color, sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate, citric acid.”
On the other hand, pure maple syrup from our own tree is made of Maple Sap. Yeah, there is still a ton of sugar … I mean it IS pretty much totally sugar, but that’s it. It does have some additional benefits as well; as reported on DailyMail, pure maple syrup is a superfood:
“Tests on the syrup, which is made by boiling sap from the maple tree, found that it contains compounds which could help manage Type 2 diabetes, as well as acting as anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory agents.”
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How many Maple trees does my family need?
It varies because this question has three parts. First, how much syrup you want? Second, some trees and some species just produce more sugar and sap so taps can vary as well. Third, the size of the tree will determine the number of taps you can drill in each year.
How much syrup do I want?
Here’s how I calculate it. No judging. My family uses a pint of syrup each week. If I started using it too, that might go to a quart. Anyway, 52 pints per year would total 6.5 gallons of Maple Syrup to get us through the year. The bad news is it takes 40 to 50 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup so to support my families ridiculous syrup consumption, they have to help me boil down somewhere in the ballpark of 260 to 325 gallons of sap. Some species like the sugar maple have higher sugar concentrations closer to 2% sugar where others maple species like the silver maple is significantly lower.
How many taps do I need?
The second part of the question is how much sap do I get from each tap? In my experience, each tap will produce somewhere around 10-20 gallons of sap per season. I have plenty of sugar maples in neighbors yards and it will realistically take 15 to 25 taps.
As a side note on this topic, box elder trees can also be tapped for syrup as well as birch trees but they have significantly less sugar than the maples do so keep that in mind if you have a hard time finding trees.
How many trees do I need?
When it comes to the tree quantity, it is actually more of an issue of tree circumference. In my experience, the ideal tree for sap production is about 1 to 2 feet in diameter. Try to identify those first. If it helps, I often bribe my neighbors with a pint of syrup from their tree if they let me put a tap in. The chart below is from the Minnesota DNR and is a great guide to safely tap a tree.
How to Identify a Maple Tree
Maple trees are very common and they are not hard to identify. Here are three easy ways to identify a Maple Tree.
The Leaf
Most people will recognize them by their distinct leaf. Confused? Just think of the Canadian flag or the Toronto Maple Leafs. The leaves have five main lobes and “U” shaped margins between them. For example, check out this jersey. He is so happy because he just got another pint of maple syrup.
The Bark
The bark is brown and furrowed. If you look closely, it gradually peels up from the sides and is smooth in the middle.
The Twigs
The twigs will range from brown to a dark red with buds at the tip which ends in a point. This video from Michael Farrell will help you identify a sugar maple in late winter.
If you still aren’t very comfortable identifying a maple during the winter, one good trick is to mark your trees in the summer or fall. This will help you identifying them when it comes time to tap. Simply tie some high visibility tape or something to it to remind you which trees you have marked. Another way to identify them is by their seeds. Maples are the only tree to make the little helicopter things that spin around while they fall.
When Do I tap Maple Trees?
In Minnesota, the tapping season usually starts in late February to early April. Sap flow is a product of freezing and thawing for the tree. Here’s how it works: During the summer, all of those leaves create sugars, which flow down into the roots and are stored there. In the winter, the roots freeze creating pressure inside the tree. As the tree thaws out that pressure sends those sugars back up the tree to feed the buds, etc… We literally tap this flow for our syrup. The best case for us is a consistent freezing and thawing for a month or so during the tapping season. This typically lasts from the end of February for 4 to 6 weeks.
How To Tap Maple Trees
Before you tap your tree, you will need to buy a tap from Amazon here: https://amzn.to/2Di8Whf. If you don’t like this style, you can browse and find another.
This one minute video quickly demonstrates how to tap your maple tree. I also have step by step directions below it.
First, drill a hole in the tree that is slanted slightly up as it is drilled so the sap runs out of the hole. The bit should be a 7/16 bit (unless you buy a different tap) and it should go in three inches. The hole will look like this:
Lightly encourage the tap to enter the hole with a hammer.
There are kits with collector bags for sap but a five-gallon bucket and a $0.10 piece of hose does the trick just fine. I washed all of the buckets with soapy water and rinsed them thoroughly.
After everything is clean, I took a 3/4 inch hose and cut it to about 8 inches long.
Each lid was drilled to make a hole just big enough for the hose to fit through. One quick tip, notice how I used a smaller drill bit than the whole size? This left some points to poke at the hose and help it stay in place.
This design did a great job keeping most rain, snow, and other junk out.
Storing the Sap
Sap does go bad. If left on the tree too long, it will spoil and you wasted a lot of time on something that will just be thrown away. It is a function of temperature more than anything though. If it stays cold, it will last for a week or so. If it gets warm it will only be good for a day or two.
The sap should be very clear. If you get cloudiness, it is getting bad. Here’s a picture of fresh sap in a cooler. If it starts to turn milky, you waited too long. You will learn fairly quickly that it is kind of an art to balancing time to boil and the sap flow.
Turning Sap into Syrup
Boil it down outside
Get a big fire and some chaffing dishes ready. The first time I made syrup the fire was way too small. I was afraid of burning the sugar. That won’t happen. Even as foam and some splashes hit the sides and crusted on, it didn’t affect the flavor at all. In fact, a burning house fire would be fine. Eventually, I used a pig roaster shown below.
I made a little video describing the process here:
As the pans boil down, just keep dumping in more sap. As the water content gets lower, the liquid will continue to get darker and thicker. It will get really gross looking. It will be foamy, cloudy, and have lots of chunks in it. This is normal as shown in the pot on the left. What you see is a lot of sugar sand. It precipitates out of the sap as it heats up and has less water to dissolve it. It isn’t anything to worry about. It is just some minerals (mostly calcium) that fall out of suspension.
Keep boiling the sap until the temperature rises above the boiling point (212 at sea level). The water in the suspension will keep the temperature at boiling until it is gone, or at least very low. So when the temperature rises, you are almost done and you can finish the rest on the stove.
Finishing the Syrup
Filter through a coffee filter first
This is just a technique, but if you can get a lot of the sugar sand out now, it will make the final filtering much easier. I like to put two pots side by side, both on burners to keep the evaporation going. I will scoop the cloudy syrup from the pig roaster out through a coffee filter into the other pan. It takes some time but it really does make up for it later. I will get 2-3 cups of sap through a single coffee filter before it clogs up. This is what is left in the filter.
Continue to boil to about 119 degrees
Leave the filtered sap on the burner and use a candy thermometer to measure the temperature. When it reaches about 119 degrees you are getting close.
Check the Density
The final part of boiling the sap is to measure the density of the liquid. You can buy a hydrometer for maple syrup here https://amzn.to/2QMyPZ1. If you already have a hydrometer from brewing, or kombucha, or some other reason, you could use that. Maple syrup needs to be between 66 and 68 Brix (66 and 68 percent sugar).
When I make my syrup, I have discovered that the boiling temperature associated with this range is about 221 degrees. It is important to get the correct density because if there is too much sugar, the syrup will crystallize. If it is too watery, you can risk mold, yeast, and other bad stuff.
Filter Through a Maple Syrup Bag
At this point, you have syrup. You can bottle it but it should be filtered one more time in a syrup bag. As part of this demonstration, I wanted to show you what would happen if you bottled it and let it sit now. This bottle was bottled right after boiling (and totally clear when I bottled it)and was only pre-filtered using the coffee filter. What you see settled on the bottom is sugar sand.
Kind of gross, right? I re-processed this with the next batch and ran it through the filter. Bags specific to maple syrup are available and are totally worth it. They are designed to take this cloud of junk out of the bottom of your jars. You can purchase one here https://amzn.to/2NXbGo5.
The key to making this easy is to pour the syrup hot so it flows. If the temperature drops below 180 degrees during filtering, just re-heat if to between 180 and 200 degrees before bottling. If you heat it above 200, you run the risk of making new sugar sand.
It takes about 10 minutes for our pre-filtered syrup to make it through the bag. This is what the bottles look like now.
Storage of Syrup
Syrup can be stored for years. It’s recommended that it stays in a dark place but I have never run into any issues. The only thing that is important to do is put them in clean jars when you bottle it.
Un-tapping the Trees
When it was all said and done, I was fairly pleased by the experience. This particular year I had 9 productive taps. Out of those taps, I was able to produce a little more than a gallon of syrup in the end so the figures at the start of this article were reasonable.
To close out the season, I ran around to all my trees and used a crowbar to gently tap out the taps.
My holes in the tree were clean and no damage like cracking was done. The tree will heal itself and will be ready for a new tap (in a different place) next year. Just make sure to stagger the taps if you use the same tree multiple times. You don’t want to make a ring of them over the years that will make the tree have a weak spot in the trunk.
Substituting Sugar with Maple Syrup
There are a lot of reasons to substitute maple syrup into your recipes. Maple syrup contains no artificial flavors, colors, or seasonings including sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup. Plus, maple syrup contains minerals like calcium, potassium, sodium, and copper meaning there are beneficial reasons to use the syrup.
For White or Brown Sugar
For every cup of white or brown sugar (the granual sugars) use 2/3 cup of maple syrup. This adds a little extra liquid to your recipes so make sure you also reduce the liquid ingredients by about 1/3 cup as well. It is also helpful to reduce heat just a small amount; maybe about 25 degrees.
For Liquid Sweeteners
Honey, molasses, and corn syrup can be swapped out on a 1 for 1 basis with maple syrup.
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