Maple sap becomes Maple Syrup at 7.5 degrees F above the local boiling point. Go boil a pan of water on your stove, use your digital thermometer to measure the temp at boiling. I bet it wont be 212F, but probably lower. Add 7.5 to that boiling point for the temperature you want to attain.
Wide Pots work best for boiling sap
When its Syrup, the sap starts to foam up, so you have to keep an eye on the process.
Be very careful. Hot sap burns bad, plus there is open flame. Use common sense, keep kids and dogs out of the way.
The wider the pot you use, the more sap you can boil off faster. Its all about surface area. This is why evaporators are wide and shallow.
Take the pot off the propane burner as soon as you reach temp. Its OK if the temp goes a bit higher, but not much higher. I find it best to finish the boil on the stove in the kitchen. Take it inside when you are within a few degrees of syrup at your elevation.
Strain through cloth, cheesecloth, whatever you like. You will have some cloudiness in the syrup if you use cheesecloth.
I realized I bit off more than I could chew about one week into this year’s maple syrup season. Ever think about a project for months, only after you start you realize, OK what did I get myself into? That’s me this year making maple syrup.
Have to clean up the rig soon.
First I built a new homemade maple syrup evaporator, I had been building it my head since last season. I found a legal size file cabinet in Brooklyn for $50, hauled it up to the house, and started building the firebox. I bought a Harbor Freight Flux Core Welder to help with the build.
For a while now I have been wanting a MIG welder, but after learning about the flux core, it was the obvious choice, and I now had a project where it would be useful. So a deep dive on YouTube on how to weld led to our first basic flux core welding video.
I had also been thinking about getting a evaporator pan made to fit right on top of the cabinet. For the previous homemade evaporator, we used steam table trays, and that’s ok, but I wanted to boil more sap in less time.
I found a guy named Zach who was selling sap evaporator pans on Ebay, and contacted him about a custom pan. A week later a cheap maple syrup evaporator pan shows up on my doorstep. Cheap isn’t the right word, but mbe that phrase will help Zach get more biz for his site through search. Really well made is a better term to describe it.
Last fall I started collecting way too many pallets to supply the firewood to boil down all the sap I was going to collect.
Way Too Many Pallets!
All during last winter I’m eyeballing more sugar maples I can tap around me. How would I run the lines, how close can I get them to the road – too much thinking. I order more tree taps and sap lines. Sap line and taps are surprisingly cheap, BTW.
And I bought a food grade pallet tote on craigslist, which holds 275 gallons of liquid.
So I fire up the new evaporator and realize quickly I’m burning wood real fast, and not getting a lot of heat in the tray. The sap is boiling OK, but it should be really boiling or I should be throwing less wood into the firebox. The fire is racing through the cabinet and going right up the stack.
Firebox Raceway
Always fun to see flames coming out of the top of a 8′ chimney. No pictures, sorry.
So while I’m slowly boiling sap, I’m collecting A LOT of sap. I had been thinking about extending some of the sap lines I do along the road up into the woods, but I’m glad I didn’t.
The big problem with collecting lots of sap is storage. I then discover the neat pallet tank freezes. And you can’t just break through the ice in the tank like you can with an open barrel. So I had 150 gallons of sap in a pallet tote that I couldn’t get out of it. The valve on the bottom, and the water in the sap, was frozen. The tank is plastic, so you can’t heat it, or it melts. The beauty of the blue plastic barrels I use is that you can break through the ice and haul out the concentrated sap in the center, then turn it on its side to dump out the ice. Not so with an enclosed tank.
A related issue was when I wanted to run a gravity fed line from the storage area up by the garage down to the evaporator, I used the 5/8″ sap line. If it was 32F or lower outside, the sap would freeze in the feed line. I gave up and hauled it with buckets.
My two big problems were the heat racing through the firebox and sap freezing in storage.
The sap freezing was easy, sell the pallet tank buy some more blue barrels for storage.
The firebox inefficiency was not as easy. Reading on the Maple Trader maple syrup forum, many sap makers build a baffle or obstruction in the firebox to get the heat to stick around longer. My friend Bill, who I learned how to make sap from, has two bricks halfway down the firebox, covered with sand. This causes the air – heat to become turbulent (we think) and stick around longer. I read about others who put a metal baffle in the box to slow the burn. One could also put a damper in the chimney.
My experiment with pre-heating the sap by running a copper tubing around the chimney stack didn’t work. The sap just didn’t warm up very much. Copper tubing is expensive! Maybe running the tubing inside the chimney may work better.
And of course, we had the epic FAIL on a glorious winter day:
Not fun…
After this I went out and bought a food grade tank that sits nicely in my trailer. BUT, like the pallet tank, you can’t let sap sit in it, you have to get it into barrels or it will freeze. The fact that the tank sits low in the trailer (good for avoiding more spill fiascos) means I have to bucket it or pump it into the taller blue barrels. I see a pump purchase in my future…
Storage: I’ve been a big proponent of doing with less, minimalism, downsizing your junk. But making maple syrup causes you to need to store quite a bit of stuff. Kinda like beekeeping. The barrels go up in the garage, but I have to find a place for the tank.
More stuff to store
What did work quite well was lining the side of the firebox with firebrick. I found the firebrick at Lowes. It was pretty cheap – previous I always thought firebrick was expensive. This type was sold as bricks to replace cracked ones in a home wood stove. I basically leaned them up against the sides of the file cabinet. This directed heat up to the evaporator pan, and kept the sides of the cabinet cooler. With the previous file cabinet evaporator, you couldn’t stand next to the rig for too long without burning your pants.
The last thing that hampered the sap season was me. I did this all by myself. Friends would be interested, but wouldn’t show up. So if you are thinking about making maple syrup, get your friends involved early.
But I am already thinking about next year!
I will post some photos of my firebox on Maple Trader and ask the experts for suggestions. My friend Bill suggested the bricks and sand method, that is the first one I will test out. Improve the sap pre-heater. And yes, test the firebox before the start of the season. Did not think to build the evaporator in the fall and boil some water to see how it all worked.
It will be easy to sell the pallet tote to a neighbor, and blue barrels are easy enough to get.
So if you are thinking of making maple syrup, start small and involve your friends. Your eyes will be bigger than what you can get done in the 3 weeks of sap season. Learn from me!
This last weekend the temperature was around 5-10 degrees F all night and day. So this played havoc with our maple syrup evaporator operation. The line that feeds raw sap to the evaporator froze as soon as I would defrost it, so I was ladling sap in to the pan by hand.
Bigger problems were elsewhere in the yard. My main sap storage tank was frozen to the point that the drain valve froze shut. Its kinda a bulky object to work with, so it just had to sit until it warms up later this week.
But one thing I had never seen is just how frozen one of my barrels out in the wood was. These barrels sit at the end of a line of maples we have tapped. This one had so much ice in it, the lid had been popped off.
I hacked through the top layer of ice knowing there would be slushy sugary sap inside. I scooped out the sap and carried it in buckets over to the evaporator.
Usually, if I have overnight ice in a bucket, its maybe an inch thick. I remove this ice and toss it. My thinking is the first ice that freezes on cool nights has a low sugar content.
But this barrel was different. It had gotten very cold, and this was a lot of ice. So I dragged a spare barrel over and connected it to the sap line, and let this one just sit. The temperature will go up later this week and I hope most of the ice will melt. Then I can haul it to the evaporator.
Tossing ice from sap buckets is one of those contentious topics in the maple syrup world. I want to borrow my friends brix refractometer and measure the ice in the buckets and the remaining liquid to see the actual sugar percentages.
I figured out how to build a homemade maple syrup evaporator because I was burning through a lot of propane when making maple syrup. I don’t make enough syrup to warrant buying one, but a DIY maple syrup evaporator was just what I needed. Watch the 2 videos below and step through the photos of the evpaorator build.
The Making Of time lapse video:
How to use the Homemade Maple Syrup Evaporator
This is made out of a metal 4 drawer file cabinet and a few steam table pans, plus some stuff you may already have or can get cheaply or for free. If you can find a 5 drawer file cabinet, even better, it will allow you space to have another pan for boiling.
This is not an original idea of mine, I learned about it through Annie Corrigan of Earth Eats, a WFIU radio program and podcast. She produced a story about Mike Bell of the Hinkle Garton Farmstead, who made this great homemade maple syrup evaporator. You can see photos of his rig here.
We have two videos of this evaporator. One is a fun time lapse of me building the rig, the second is a walk through of how to use make maple syrup with it. Below the videos are photos of building the evaporator and more videos on how to make maple syrup
Before I built this evaporator, I was using a lot of propane to boil down sap into syrup, you can watch a video of how we use a propane turkey deep fryer to make maple syrup here. The turkey fryer method works, but you burn through the propane, and make a bunch of trips to the hardware store buying refills.
I did not keep close track of how many gallons of sap I boiled down in a day, but if you keep on top of it, I imagine you can boil down about 50-70 gallons a day, depending on the sugar ratio of your sap and how hot your fire burns. Pallets and scrap lumber burn hotter than firewood, I found.
Click Here to go to the next page for photos and instructions on how to build the homemade maple syrup evaporator.
This is a homemade maple syrup evaporator made out of a metal filing cabinet. It is brilliant and works really well for how simple it is. Using free or almost free stuff, you can make a DIY evaporator. Most of the items I had around the garage or shop.
Couple of things first: • Use this information at your own risk.
• Wear the proper eye, hand, mouth, ear protection when using power tools and assembling any DIY project.
If you haven’t already, watch the two videos we made about the file cabinet evaporator. One is a time lapse of the evaporator build, the other is a walk through of how to use the DIy evaporator to make maple syrup. Then go through the photos and info below.
Terra Cotta garden pots or firebrick or some other heat resistant objects
Steel grate the width and length of the cabinet. This one is 12″ x 48″
After you build this, fill the pans with water and fire it up. Let it burn for an hour or however long it takes for the paint to blister. I scraped the blistered paint off and put it in the trash.
Some paint will remain, as you can see in the photos.
I tried different lengths of pipe for the chimney. It helps if the chimney is higher than your head, so you get less smoke in your eyes.
The steam table trays need the angle iron to suspend them over the fire. Do a dry fit with all the angle iron and pans in place before screwing them in.
In the video, I attached a bathroom fan to the evaporator. I discovered I did not need to use the fan, as I was burning scrap lumber, which burns hot and fast. If you are burning firewood, you may want to attach one. Its better if you attach the fan to the front of the evaporator rather than the side like I did.
I did not have an adjustable air intake, I found if I kept the door slightly open, that worked very well.
I used terra cotta pots and steel grating to raise the fire up closer to the pans. I found this worked well for me. I did not line the evaporator with firebrick. Though I could see lining it would make it easier to stand next to the rig and carry the heat better. If the fire died down, the boil did too. Firebrick may have helped that.
For Version 2.0 of this homemade maple syrup evaporator, I will move the pans closer to the chimney, and have that extra space that I filled in with a piece of drawer right above the firebox door. The area right near the front door was not nearly as hot as the rear of the box.
This design is based on one by Mike Bell of the Hinkel Garton Farmstead, I learned of it by listening to Annie Corrigan on Earth Eats, a WFIU radio show and podcast. Here is a set of photos on their Flickr page
A new how to tap maple trees video for you. We just tapped our sugar maples, getting ready for maple syrup season, and we made another video about how to tap your sugar maple trees. We have more great how to make maple syrup videos below this video.
We use tubing and tree saver taps to tap our sugar maples. You can buy tree saver taps here. The tubing leads to a barrel made of food grade plastic. You can also line a 30 gallon trash can with a food grade plastic bag.
You can also have 5 or 6 gallon buckets at the base of each tree and run your tubes into them. But its easier to empty one big barrel instead of a bunch of small buckets in deep snow.
This year the maple syrup season started late and we have so far only had a few days of sap running. We need warm days and cold nights for the sap to run, and we have had way too many cold days.
I am tapping trees on my neighbor’s land this year as well. They have some nice sugar maples right on the road, which makes hauling sap much easier. Imagine walking through the woods carrying buckets of water through deep snow. Now you know why I use lines and tap trees near the road!
We have a bunch of how to make maple syrup videos here on GardenFork. It is super fun to tap your own trees and boil down sap into syrup. Watch our videos to learn how.
Its 7 degrees F in the yard. 1 1/2 feet of snow. I strapped on my snowshoes and took the Labradors out back on the woods trail. Charlie Pup grabs a large stick, Henry loses her ball in the snow almost immediately. She digs around to find it.
I’m also thinking about the maple syrup season. Around here, trees are usually tapped around Daytona weekend, aka, Valentines Day, February 14th. But its been quite cold this year, temperatures have been below average this winter.
The ideal for tapping sugar maples is cold nights and warm days above freezing (32F). This hasn’t happened yet. Have to see what happens in the next few weeks. I ordered some additional tubing and taps, hoping to tap more trees this year.
This post started when I grabbed the last jar of last year’s maple syrup out of the fridge. I let the first batch of syrup off the burner get too hot, and some of it turned to maple candy, which clings to the sides of the jar. Knock off junk of it with a knife and its hard candy. Don’t try to crunch it with your teeth, btw.
I think the sap season will be late this year. I haven’t seen any of my neighbors starting to ready their sap houses or buckets or lines, and they are usually right. I’ll have to make a few phone calls to see what they think today.
The maple candy has a subtle taste, kinda like a low key breath mint, I thought it would have a more pronounced taste, seeing that the syrup it was made from has a strong flavor. But sugar goes through all sorts of changes when its heated to different temperatures, and a few degrees makes all the difference.
We have a bunch of how to make maple syrup videos here on the site if you’d like to check them out. And let us know your thoughts below:
Eric talks with Bill of Maple Knoll Farm about tapping Maple Trees for sap, making maple syrup, and how this warm winter is affecting the maple syrup season. Bill can be seen in our GF Video Make Maple Syrup here. Bill has about 150 trees tapped, using metal buckets. He and his family collect the maple sap, and boil it down in the evaporator in the family sugar shack. This warm winter weather has thrown a wrench in the usual maple syrup making process. Sap runs in sugar maple trees when the nights are cold and the days are warm. This year we’ve had just warm weather for the most part.
In the sugar shack, Bill and his family fire up the evaporator and boil down the sugar maple sap to syrup. Its very cool process to watch. There are several maple syrup operations in our town, and we visited another one recently and made this how to make maple syrup video there. Each sugar shack is different, reflecting the interior design sense of each sap house owner.
A number of our neighbors tap maple trees to make maple syrup, here is a video about using sap buckets and taps.
Learn how to identify Sugar Maples trees, make sure you are tapping the right kind of maple trees with this neat tree identification book, Bark. The great thing about this book is that its based on bark identification, not leaf identification, because when you think about tapping trees, there aren’t any leaves on the trees, you know..
Here is the tree identification book we like to use:
Buy From An Indie Bookstore Here Buy From Amazon Here
Watch all our maple syrup videos here on the site!
Despite a wonderful head cold, i spent a large part of the weekend with my friend Bill at his sugar house boiling maple sap. Making maple syrup is one of my favorite things to do in late winter, and in this video Bill shows us how to boil maple sap to make maple syrup
{ bill’s farm is also where we have some of our beehives, you can see them in the Beginning Beekeeping Videos }
One error I see people do is to tap maple trees that are not sugar maples, there is a difference. Consult a good tree identification book, like this one called Bark: A Field Guide to Trees of the Northeast
, which is handy when identifying trees in winter, it has lots of pictures of tree bark.
Do you tap your trees? How do you boil your sap? I plan on doing it myself this winter, and am deciding between using tubing or buckets. What are your thoughts on buckets or tubing lines? Let us know below, thanks.
This video shows how we improved version of making maple syrup with a propane burner
Eric talks with Bill of Maple Knoll Farm about tapping Maple Trees for sap, making maple syrup, and how this warm winter is affecting the maple syrup season. Bill can be seen in our GF Video Make Maple Syrup here. Bill has about 150 trees tapped, using metal buckets. He and his family collect the maple sap, and boil it down in the evaporator in the family sugar shack. This warm winter weather has thrown a wrench in the usual maple syrup making process. Sap runs in sugar maple trees when the nights are cold and the days are warm. This year we’ve had just warm weather for the most part.
