How I Spent My Quarantine Making Maple Syrup
Spring is the ideal time to collect maple sap and boil it down to syrup. When COVID-19 hit, writer and photographer Andy Cochrane paused his travels around the country and headed home just in time to help his parents with their annual maple-syrup operation in northern Minnesota. Here's how they did it.
The COVID-19听pandemic听forced me, a nomad of five years,听to head back home to my parents鈥 house听in northern Minnesota.听Starting in late March, as temperatures begin to听rise above freezing during the day, sap starts running from the trees around our house, and that鈥檚 when my parents tap them for maple syrup. This year I got to take part.
The process begins听with finding a group听of sugar maple trees. (Other maple trees work, but sugar maples have the highest sugar content.) The stand my parents use is on public land听five miles from our house, just up a dirt road. Nearby, a handful of other families tap syrup from the same group of trees.
Small steel taps (also called spouts or spiles) are then hammered into predrilled holes on the south side of the tree, which听gets the most sun and warms up the most during the day. We tap around 50 trees each year to gift syrup to friends and family.
Each tap is given a gallon-size听bucket, bag, or recycled milk jug to catch the sap. Some advanced collectors use lines with vacuums to streamline the process. Our operation is relatively small,听so the manual process isn鈥檛 too cumbersome. Every day that the temperature rises above freezing (ideally above 40 degrees), we鈥檒l visit the stand and collect the sap. We often go听in the late afternoon to maximize our keep.
Most days we bring home five to ten gallons. Sap looks a lot like water听and has just听a hint of sweetness to it. A door-to-door听outing takes about an hour. On some days, thanks to weather and a bit of luck, we hit a sap jackpot. On our last day of the season this year, we collected 40 gallons of sap鈥攜ou could see it dripping out of the metal taps like water from a faucet. Though it听varies each year,听generally 40 gallons of sap yields one gallon of syrup.
Because the ground is still covered in snow in the spring, we hike through the woods in snowshoes. Each five-gallon bucket can hold听over 30 pounds of sap. The snowshoes help us avoid punching through the snow and spilling our liquid treasure.
Once we get these buckets out to the road, we seal them with a lid and throw them into the back of the truck.
Then comes the fun part: the boil. Sap reduces to syrup when it鈥檚 boiled down.听Every maple-syrup maker does this part a bit differently. We use two wood furnaces and often spend all day boiling and stoking the furnaces frequently to keep them hot.
To retain as much heat as possible during this step, we built a three-sided makeshift reflector. The sap boil creates a lot of steam; if you were to do it in your house, you鈥檇听risk getting all your surfaces a little sticky. The last part of the boil is the trickiest, as听the sap听quickly gets concentrated. To avoid burning听the bottom layer, we stop when it gets seven degrees above the boiling point of water鈥攐r just when it tastes good.
To store it, we听either pour our finished product听into bottles and keep it听refrigerated,听or we sterilize mason jars by boiling them in water, then pouring in the syrup听and sealing them听well.听Syrup is,听of course,听great on pancakes and waffles, but it also can be used听as a sweetener for teas and coffee or drizzled on peanut butter toast.