Maple Syrup - Tree to bottle

Ken makes maple syrup.  Each spring when the warm weather starts he taps trees.  Optimum weather to collect sap is sunny 40 degree days with no wind and nights in the 20's.  The sap goes up during the day and down during the night.  Some goes into the spile and to the bucket.

Ken collects the sap from the buckets.  This year I helped him a couple times.

Then he fills a shallow pan called an evaporator and lights a fire under it to boil down the sap to syrup.












When it is nearly syrup we bring it to the house. 

There I get it to the right sugar concentration - 219 degrees, 32 on the Baum scale and 66% on Brix scale.  

Then we filter and bottle it.  This year in addition to our usual reused juice jars, we also filled pint bottles and 8 oz bottles.  

Then I label them and they are ready to sell.  Some people call maple syrup liquid gold.  It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. I like to think that two five gallon buckets of sap make one quart of syrup!