#maple sugaring

Novel new maple sugaring device! Outdated IV tubing allowing for very precise calculation of maple sap rates. Currently have one tree (sugar maple) that’s putting out a liter an hour (calculated from 4 spiles), and this one (silver maple) that’s putting out 270mL/ hour (calculated from 3 spiles). We also have a walnut tree that’s putting out 60mL/hour.

We walked through our snowy woods to identify the sugar maples and measure them. I carried the scissors and the tape measure, and my husband had the twine and his notebook with its little map. We marked four trees in the yard and three in the acreage, and next weekend we’ll drive the spiles in, and maybe the sap will start flowing the week after that.

a children’s fair pops up at the outdoor mall near my cousins’ house in Montreal and the maple sugaring stand, propped cheerily in the center of childhood chaos, delights me as much as it does my cousins’ kids.

drawn in by the smell of maple syrup, the kids and i make our way to the lumberjack of a man wearing a red flannel (i call him ‘the gardener’) who tends to a wooden planter filled with shaved-ice soil. he pours sap into neat rows, then pots popsicle sticks into the syrupy pools. the gardener smiles at his handiwork, then gestures at me as if to say pick your own poppy!

i take hold of a popsicle stick stem and make it twirl.

the syrup’s tacky texture catches at cold rubble. jagged ice shards poke through the translucent taffy and sunlight trickles through the gold glass. the popsicle turns into its full form: honey-colored crystalline.

when i finally bring the popsicle to my mouth, my tongue stings brightly.

the taste is delicious. the musky flavor of maple is almost savory, but this only plays a low note in the saccharine song of processed sweetness.

the mouthfeel, however, is confounding. liquid drips from a congealed core and two textures (thin and thick) entangle, confuse my teeth. while maple-flavored water floods my tongue, syrupy goo latches onto the back of my molars.

i lick too far above my top lip and cringe at the vision of a maple syrup mustache. i contemplate whether this was a good idea or not. because the feeling of sticky fingers and glaceéd lips nauseates me.

plus, Montreal’s spring break is not spring at all but stinging snow chill under the guise of a mislabeled season, slicing at vulnerable cheeks and wet lips.

here i am, letting the culprit melt down my throat.

but the kids crave it, used to the gummy mouthfeel familiar with the feeling of snowflakes on their tongues.

oh yeah my parents are in the midst of it because the new farm they bought has so many sugar maples on it. they've got a whole big set up and they're boiling every couple of days and they can't keep with with 750 gallons at a time - three totes. they literally have to feed the evaporator every two minutes or something ridiculous to keep it going. boils like 90 gallons of sap an hour. it is r i d i c u l o u s

My b-i-l made a whole rig out of stock tanks and tubes and such and hand-made an evaporator with cinder blocks and firewood and such, and then he did the math and realized he’d have to tap 200 trees to get any kind of economy of scale and was like. No. So... they just do personal use, and that’s it. I was trying to tell him he should get CSA members to take sap and boil it themselves and he was like yeah no. 

We just finished about a 20-gallon batch and filtered it into... a quart jar. Yup. Hoo. Ok. 

buttons-beads-lace replied to your post “Today has been A Day and I haven’t, like, done anything. Nothing went...”

at the moment I have to go to a thing, but I could probably sort out a "pounds of sugar per gallon" to "whatever other measurement of concentration" conversion for you later if you send me the details.

I finally managed to prevail upon my dude to look at charts and he found one. If I want a finishing alcohol by volume around 10% then I would need the brix measurement to be 18-20% sugar when I start.