Now that we’re veteran backyard sugaring producers (that’s fancy-city-folk-talk for making maple syrup) with our 2nd batch, we doubled our output to 1.9 gallons of product, bringing our production costs down to about $475 per gallon. The horses kept knocking the bags off the trees, which was fine since we were getting tired of this [...]
Archive for March, 2007
Making Maple Syrup – Canning the final product
Michele likes to can things, so she finished the first batch the next morning while I stumbled off to bed. We started with 6 gallons of maple tree sap – FOR EACH OF THE LITTLE JARS YOU SEE HERE! It take approximately 43 gallons of sap to be boiled down to 1 gallon of syrup. [...]
Making Maple Syrup – Cooking the first batch (the hardest way known to man – ugh!)
Using plastic storage buckets, stainless kitchen strainers, some new canning pots from Wal-Mart, a digital thermometer, a 60 year old concrete outdoor barbecue, and a lot of firewood, we made our first batch of maple syrup just like the Native Americans did (except they didn’t have plastic storage buckets, stainless kitchen strainers, canning pots, digital [...]
Making Maple Syrup – Harvesting the sap
Michele thought I was crazy when I announced we were going to make maple syrup this year. We tried a couple of different ways to harvest the sap using different spouts, buckets, and bags. We found the most effective ways were the oldest, using hand crafted Amish taps with hooks, and some simple plastic buckets.
