Big syrup operations, even medium sized and smaller ones, boil their sap outside. The process of concentrating sap into syrup gives off lots of condensation, which can wreak havoc on drywall, wallpaper, painted surfaces, and other items found inside houses.
Despite this, we've boiled our sap inside the past three years because we just didn't have that much to boil down. A gallon or two here, another gallon or two there, it just wasn't worth the effort to do it outside.
This year, however, we've collected more sap than the past three years combined, and I didn't want to boil that much sap inside. So I set things up on our fire pit and boiled the sap outside.
For this first batch (which I did at the beginning of February), I started with about 16 gallons of sap (about 12 gallons of black walnut and about 4 of maple, which I co-mingled). After 8 hours over the wood fire I had about a gallon and a half of concentrated sap, which I took inside to finish on the stove. I actually ended up leaving it in the frig for a few days before combining it with my next batch of sap that needed finishing.
just getting the fire started and the sap warming
The stock pot is for warming the sap and is used to fill the roasting pan, which is much more efficient at boiling the sap because of its wider surface area. As the sap in the roasting pan boils down, I add more sap from the stock pot. It's not the most efficient way to do it (bigger operations have large flat pans with valves for adding sap and drawing off almost-syrup for finishing), but it's much quicker than doing it in stockpots on the stove inside.
The weather has been quite rainy lately, so I ended up storing 5 gallon buckets of sap in the freezer in the basement until we had a day dry enough to get outside. I think at one point I had two 5 gallon buckets in the freezer, and a 2 gallon bucket and a 2 gallon stock pot in the fridge. At that point there was no more room to store sap, so I decided it was time to boil, regardless of whether the weather was optimal and the wood still wet.
A sugar shack to shelter under would be nice, but isn't exactly a good use of money, given how little we produce. In more northern regions, maple syrup producers are able to store their sap outside or in a snowbank until they're ready to boil, but that's just not an option for us, hence using the fridge and freezer to store our sap.
full boil in the roasting pan
Using the fire pit isn't optimal- too much ash floats up and into the pans. A closed system where the wood is added from the side and the pans rest in a snug fitting opening in the top would be better. But as I mentioned earlier, we're only planning on living here a couple more years, so I just don't think it's worth the investment of time, money, and effort to find or make a better system. Filtering the sap a couple times removes the ash and leaves clean syrup, so the fire pit isn't a terrible alternative.
I finally bought an hydrometer (which measures sugar content), but it turned out to be for brewing, which is a cold process, and it wasn't calibrated for the much hotter process of making maple syrup. So I had to return it and look for a different one. That's what I get for picking the cheapest one I could find. Oops. In the meantime, I'll be back to guessing about when the syrup is done. Though according to the maple syrup facebook group I'm a part of, 7 or 7.5 degrees above the boiling point of water is the point at which syrup is done. The exact temperature fluctuates based on your elevation, but can also fluctuate based on the weather that day, so the best way to do this is to boil a pot of water while finishing your syrup, so you know what the correct temperature is right then.
I hadn't taken one of the buckets out of the freezer early enough, so I ended up melting it down in the roasting pan. A slower process that involved ladling sap from the roasting pan into the stock pot, but it worked.
I was talking about making maple syrup with an acquaintance, and she asked if I'd ever had hickory syrup. I'd never heard of it, so I did a little research. Hickory syrup is not actually made from the sap of hickory trees, but instead, it's made from boiling the bark and adding sugar. So interesting. We have a few hickory trees, so this fall while we're collecting black walnuts and hickory nuts we'll also be looking for hickory bark to collect so we can give hickory syrup a try.
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