In the fall of 2019 we took a trip to Vermont and absolutely loved our time up there. If you’ve been to Vermont, you know that maple syrup is everything up there. We enjoyed visiting a maple farm, looking at all the maple trees with their taps, and eating all the maple flavored everything. This trip inspired my husband to research how we could tap our own backyard maple tree. Alex hates our maple trees because it has been so hard to grow anything in our yard because of them, so he was determined to get something useful out of them.
I originally kind of brushed off all of his talk about tapping our trees as a momentary obsession that would probably never come to fruition, but he proved me wrong. And let me tell you, I’m so glad he did. This was our very first experience making maple syrup, so we are nowhere near experts, in fact, we learned a lot in the process. But it was such a fun experience and we can’t wait to apply our knowledge next year to hopefully become more efficient and skilled at making maple syrup.
Alex purchased a tap online and we got some flat-back buckets. One thing that made this year hard was that you have to tap the maple trees when it is above freezing temperatures during the day and below freezing temperatures at night. Here in Iowa, we very quickly moved from freezing temps to above freezing temps, so we only had about a week of prime tapping conditions.
Alex just cut out some scrap wood to make tops for the buckets. These buckets would fill so fast during the days we had prime tapping weather. Sometimes we would have to empty them twice a day to keep them from overflowing.
We ended up collecting around 14 gallons of sap. We stored it in our fridge and freezers until we were ready to boil it. Let me tell you, it took up so much space. I had maple sap everywhere.
We picked a nice warm Saturday to do our boil. You have to boil the maple sap outside because of all the steam it produces. I didn’t want to scorch my good cooking pots, so we went to Goodwill and found the perfect big stock pot to use for only $7. We have an outdoor fireplace with a grate over the fire, so we used that for our heat source.
We started boiling around 8:00 AM and we were boiling until sunset. It was such a fun day. Alex was pretty much constantly chopping wood to keep the fire roaring, but I was able to do a lot of yard work in between tending to the sap. Once the sap would evaporate enough, I would just keep adding sap to the pot. Again and again and again. This is a very slow process and it took a long time to boil it all down.
Once we had it all boiled down, it had become a light golden color. We strained it and put it back into the fridge until we could do the final boil. It still took up so much room in my fridge. The final boil is done inside so you can monitor the temperature and get to the perfect syrup consistency. I just poured all of the boiled down sap into my regular soup pot and brought it to a boil. I used a thermometer to monitor the temperature. I read that 219 degrees Fahrenheit should be the perfect temperature for syrup. It took a long time to reach this temperature. My sap hung out at 215 degrees for a very long time, but we finally reached 219 and it was perfect!
When it reached temp, I began straining it through coffee filters. As this was our first time trying this, I didn’t feel like purchasing actual maple syrup strainers, so I just used what I had. It worked just fine, however, it took so much time. Next year, now that I know we enjoy making our own maple syrup, I will definitely invest in some proper supplies.
After all that work we got this single jar of maple syrup. It doesn’t look like much, but we definitely think it was worth it. This syrup is by far, the tastiest maple syrup we have ever had. Knowing that we made it completely by ourselves from our own maple tree gives us such a sense of accomplishment. It was very time consuming, but we had a blast.
This year, we only tapped one of our trees, but next year I would really love to tap both of our trees and try to get a bigger batch. I also want to purchase some actual maple syrup supplies, like filters. Hopefully next year we will also have a longer tapping season. Have you ever tapped your maple tree? Would you ever go to this much work to make your own maple syrup? I would love to hear about your maple syrup making experience!
