Maple Syrup, Part 1

This year we decided to try our hands at making maple syrup. We'll walk through what we did; in this first part, we'll go through and collect the sap.

We started out with a collection of spiles purchased from Lehman's, a spile driving tool, and a generally highly recommended book on the subject, Backyard Sugarin' by Rink Mann. Here are some of the spiles

and here is the driving tool.



Here is the way the driving tool fits into the spile. The tool keeps you from damaging/bending the spile when you drive it into the tree with a hammer. Once the hole is drilled, you put the more "closed" end of the spile in the tree - spout out - and fit the driver into the spile. A few strikes with a hammer fits it nicely into place.

Here's a picture of the brace and drill bit - one picture with my "helper":


and here's one with the helper's butt shooed away from the brace handle:



The bit size is 7/16", which is the standard size for these spiles. Obviously this is a manual tool, but I'm sure a power drill would work just as well. The big thing is to make sure and have the right size drill bit for your spiles - and if you buy commerically manufactured ones, the 7/16" bit size is what you want to get.

And here is the tree - with cats at this particular moment.

This is clearly a nice sized tree, capable of carrying at least 3 buckets and likely 4. I'm only going to put 3 on it, however, out of respect. One of the "rules" is that you shouldn't tap a tree under 10" diameter; another is that you really shouldn't put more than 4 taps on a tree, regardless of what monster tree you have have. That's not to say that people haven't successfully put more on a tree, but I'm not going to overdo it. 3 taps will do quite well for our first attempts.

Here's Jonathan making our tap hole:



And here I am finishing up the hole. Note that in both pictures the drill bit is making a slight upward angle into the tree. The hole should be some 2.5" - 3" deep. This is deep enough to comfortably tap into the sap flow but still stay well away from the heartwood.

Here's a shot of the drill bit in the tree,

and here's a shot of the resultant hole. The "foamy" stuff underneath the hole is sap starting to flow out already.


Here's a shot of the spile in the tree. I didn't get a good shot of the actual hammering into the tree, but suffice to say that a few taps on the driving tool with the hammer set it into place with very little trouble. You can see the sap starting to run out of the spile in this picture as well.


From here, the question became how to best collect all this lovely sap. After a few tries with some plastic milk jugs and stainless steel buckets, I made a hybridized system with some vinyl tubing, milk jugs, and everyone's favorite tool, duct tape.

Here's a shot of my tubing over the spile - no duct tape, so you can see what it was doing. I used 3/4" tubing, which slipped easily over the end of the spile up to the hanging bracket. The other end was also secured with duct tape. The tube did a great job of sending the sap into the top of my milk jug as well as keeping out the flies that were attracted to the sap as the weather warmed a bit. The chickens keep a sharp eye on what's going on.



Here's a shot of the sap collected basically overnight. Although a bit hard to see, it also gives you an idea of how the tubes were duct-taped to the jugs. I had to graduate from the 1-gallon milk jugs to one of our 5-gallon water jugs to take care of all the sap. The extra is collected in the glass jars. It's very clear - like very clean water. If you taste it, it does have the very slightest sweet taste to it.

In the next part, we'll boil this sap down into some maple syrup.