Making the Maple Syrup

With a lull on the farm, a great winter and 3 maple trees on our front lawn "sugarin" was calling to me.
I have always wanted to try my hand at it and the local Agway was selling the equipment so we tried it out.   I had been collecting sap for the past week.  I had about 7 gallons from the 3 trees and 5 taps.

I didn't know what to expect.  We collected a little bit each day over the course of a glorious warm spring like week the first part of March.  We then had a blizzard come through which gave me a day off from other responsibilities. So what better time to reduce the sap.  It takes about 36-40 gallons of sap to get one gallon. Basically you boil off that much water to reduce it to syrup consistency.

We had a clambake setup my brother had given us along with a full tank of propane so I filled the pot about 7 gallons worth of the 10 gallon pot and got it to a boil.  This was about 9:00 in the morning.  I figured I would be lucky to gat about a pound and half of syrup out of the sap.  It took till about 4:00 in the afternoon to finish the boil and then we filtered it through some cheesecloth.  The resulting taste was delicious for our first attempt.  Maybe we'll gather  some more sap over the next week and try it again.