Last Saturday we boiled down our maple sap. This is the first year we've tried to use our new metal pans. Overall it was a fantastic success. My dh built a fire box out of concrete blocks.
First we put one pan on and tested it with just 2 gallons of sap. No leaks this time so we were good to go.
Then we put on the second pan. That pan had one leak but it seemed to close up once the pan got hot.
We kept the fire going all day (well, my dh and children did). I was inside a lot of the day finishing up the sap that I had already boiled down on the screened in porch in my big electric cooker.Here's a close up of the fire and the high tech leak containment system we employed.
It wasn't hard work, just steady work. Someone had to keep adding wood to the fire and someone else had to keep adding sap. Nathan was mostly chopping firewood. 
My dh estimated that if we kept the sap at a rolling boil, we would boil off 7 gallons of water per hour.
We gathered a lot of dead wood from the woods to keep the fire going.
We boiled into the night and then filled up both pans with all the sap we had left and went to bed.
On Sunday after church, we started boiling again and got the sap boiled down so that it fit in one pan. We continued boiling and were just about to give it another half hour or so when it started to snow. That did it. We strained the sap and brought it indoors. 
We had about 8 gallons of the reduced sap when we brought it in. I strained it once more using a special paper filter and then it was time to boil inside with the vent on full blast. I boiled this sap Sunday night and then some on Monday morning and finished about lunchtime.
End result: 159.5 gallons of sap collected and 3 gallons, 3 quarts, and 1 pint of syrup canned. We actually had two different types of syrup. That is almost a 40 to 1 ratio which is excellent considering that we only have red maples, not sugar maples.The lighter syrup was made from the sap that was collected early and reduced on the porch. The darker syrup was made from the later sap. The darker color is natural for sap that is collected closer to the end of the season. The lighter syrup is very delicate in flavor but the darker syrup is more robust and seems like it has a touch of molasses in it.
Both were excellent on pancakes the next day!
2 comments:
How do you know when your syrup is *done* ? Obviously you can't go by color, I see! Is it by temperature?
Yes, you could do it by temperature. It would be finished about 7 degrees above boiling temperature for the day. But the best way is to use a hygrometer which measures the density. You put some hot syrup in this tube, gently put in the hygrometer and see if it floats. When you can see a certain red line above the surface of the syrup, the syrup is done. I also had the temp probe in and one batch was done at 223 deg F and one at 221 deg F. So it was best to do it with the hygrometer.
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