Maple Sugaring is a year 'round commitment, but our busiest time runs from February through mid-April, when we are tapping trees, gathering sap, and boiling it down into delicious syrup. We live in the beautiful hills of the Monadnock Region of southwest New Hampshire. Here winters are long and snowy, as seen in these snowbanks.

Around Mid-February, the days have lengthened enough to allow temperatures to go above freezing, which thaws the sapwood of the maple tree, allowing the first drops of sap to flow. I watch the weather like a hawk at this point, and when the time is right, I head out into the woods with my snowshoes and portable drill and begin making 9/32" diameter holes in the trees, which the taps go into. Last year I took my oldest son 'Little Jon' along with me tapping.

The taps we use are called 'Healthspouts', because their small size helps the tree to heal up quicker in the summer and it also allows us to tap trees we wouldn't have tapped with the older, bigger taps. In this photo you can see the old style on the left, with the new ones on the right. The right most one is a cast aluminum one that we use with our buckets.

Over two-thirds of our taps use plastic maple tubing to bring the sap downhill to collection tanks. The reason for this is simple. Sap collection is a time consuming process, especially in deep snow and hilly terrain. Tubing saves a dramatic amount of time and it also keeps the sap cleaner before the boiling process.

Many factors determine the amount of sap which will flow on a given day, but the simplest formula is to look for days in the 40s, with lows in the 20s. This will usually give a good run. Some big runs can occur on a sunny day after a snowfall, or during a rainstorm, possibly due to changing atmospheric pressure. When enough sap has dripped into our tanks and buckets, I head out with my pickup truck, which holds a 210 plastic tank in the back, designed for maple sap.

I have a small electric pump that runs off an inverter connected to my battery, which pumps the sap from the collection tanks to my truck. That's the easy collecting. Harder is the 100 or so bucket taps, which need to be tended on foot individually, some with the help of my tractor. This is where I get a bit of a workout, as some are a way from the road. I use buckets mainly in areas where people don't want to see maple tubing.

Some of my sweetest and most prolific sap producing trees are bucket tapped, so the extra effort is worth it. Sap we collect ranges in sweetness from a low of 1.5% sugar to 2.6%. I have tested some trees at over 3%, which is a very sweet tree. Next I bring the sap to the sugarhouse and pump it into holding tanks behind the house, where it is gravity fed into the evaporator.

During the process of boiling, we remove on average 40 gallons of water to make a gallon of syrup. There is a rule of 86, which says that you take 86 and divide it by the sweetness of your sap, and that will give you how much water will need to be removed to get syrup. So, 86/2%=43 gallons of water removed to make 1 gallon of syrup. At 3% sap, you drop dramatically to 29 gallons of water/ gallon of syrup.

That's the reason syrupmakers are always on the hunt for sweet trees. Once the pans have about an inch of sap in them, we light the kindling, then gradually add wood to the fire, turning up the blower. This process continues until there is just a little sap left in storage, at which time we stop firing the evaporator, and begin to let it cool down. The firebox is reloaded about every 6 minutes, because the wood is consumed so quickly by the fire.

During the process of boiling, bubbles foam up in the pans, necessitating the use of a Kosher-approved vegetable oil defoamer to bring down the foam, before it overspills the pans and makes a mess. We use wood from our land to boil our sap, mostly white pine that's been culled out to make room for other maple trees to grow to tapable size.

This means cutting, splitting and stacking about 4-5 cords per year. This is the age-old traditional way of producing syrup, going back to the settlers days in the 1700's. Many sugarmakers have switched to heating oil over the years for convenience, but we like to use what we have available and we think that it's more environmentally sound too. Within an hour of the start of boiling, sometimes less depending on the sweetness of the sap, we reach a point where syrup is drawn off the evaporator.

This is at a point that's about 7 degrees above the boiling point of water. It's at that point that we crack open the drawoff valve and let a small, steady stream of syrup come off the pan and into our collecting pan. Once the temperature falls below an established mark, say 6 degrees above boiling, we stop taking off syrup, and transfer it to the finishing pan, where it passes through several layers of paper and cloth filters specially made for maple syrup, which remove excess mineral sediments produced in the concentrating process.

These minerals consist of mostly potassium and calcium, naturally occurring in the soil, which can impart a slightly bitter taste to the syrup, in addition to making it cloudy looking. We keep adding to the finishing pan until there's about 5 gallons in it, at which point we check it for the proper density of syrup. Syrup can legally range in density from 65.5 to 66.9 Brix. Brix is a numbering scale, which roughly measures the amount of sugar solids in the syrup. We produce syrup at 66.9 Brix or slightly higher.

We feel the thicker syrup tastes better, since just a degree difference in Brix can be felt on the tongue. We have received many complements for how our syrup tastes, with some people commenting they never tasted syrup thick like ours before. To check the density we use an hydrometer, and a cup. The syrup is poured into the cup, with the hydrometer floating to surface. As the syrup in the finishing pan boils, the reading will change. Once we reach the density we're looking for, we either pack some jugs or fill a 5 gallon drum for later repacking into smaller bottles. Here's a young visitor helping me seal some bottles I've just filled.

We also grade the syrup at this point. Grading is based solely on color, namely Light, Medium, Dark and Grade B. To do this we fill a small glass bottle then compare it in the light with a series of grading bottles. Once a sap run has been processed, which is an evening's work, we shut everything down and wait for the next run.

After several boils, the evaporator begins to get dirty, with mineral deposits building up in the pans. Several times a season, we empty out the pans fill them with water and a food grade acid(phosphoric acid, like found in soda), to dissolve the deposits. We light a small fire and begin scrubbing. It takes some time and elbow grease, but we take the time to do this diligently and completely. This is another hallmark in premium-quality syrup, since it helps keep the excellent flavor and color. Once the pans are sparkling clean, they are ready to boil again.

As the days get warmer, and the nights no longer regularly fall below freezing, around mid-April, the syrup season ends. This is when we spend a lot of time cleaning equipment. I back flush all the tubing lines with plenty of fresh water, which cleans out any sap still in them that can breed bacteria, and lower the quality of future syrup production. All the buckets and holding tanks are taken down and washed individually, triple rinsed and stacked to dry. The evaporator is torn down and cleaned completely, along with a hosing down of the sugarhouse. Then we take stock of our season, remembering what worked and thinking about how we can improve the process for next season.

Over the summer, we spend most of our time cutting and stacking wood under cover, so that it can be nice and dry come the next sugaring season. You can see the woodshed attached to the back of the sugarhouse, which holds some of our wood. It's also a time to make repairs or improvements to the sugarhouse and to the tubing lines. We like to dress up our home with flowers, some planted in old sap buckets which have become leaky. We watch the weather, hoping for frequent showers, which will keep the maple trees in good health, and hopefully lead to sweet sap next year.

As the leaves change color in October, we are blessed with a beautiful display in our own backyard of yellows, oranges and reds. It is also the time that I go around the neighborhood and dig up some young maple saplings and plant them across my land where the maples aren't well established. Pictured here is a tree I planted a couple years ago. It's about an inch thick at the trunk and a vigorous grower. It'll be another 15-20 years before I can begin to think of tapping it, but it will be fun watching it grow.

Once the heart of winter sets in, everything is at rest, waiting for the first warm days of late winter to arrive. Here the sugarhouse awaits another busy season, blanketed in snow.