A beautiful spring Saturday here so I started my maple syrup production. I tapped the only sugar maple on my property and it gave good results. Because the sap runs for a few weeks, off and on, I used natural refrigeration to store the drippings. Now that I have as much sap as I will get this spring I used my Coleman 457G Gas Plant to boil the liquid. As the boil continues the solution turns dark as the sugars become concentrated. In order to keep the main pot boiling I preboiled small amounts of sap on my Coleman 500B and then transferred to the main pot. The HGP ran for 9 hrs on approx 2 gal. of white gas. I finished the boil indoors as the weather turned ugly. Final product about 2 liters from 50 liters of sap. This will go good with pancakes or baked beans this summer. This is a welcome task after a long winter.
Well done. That's real cool. I'll take a litre please! Just got some store bought this morning. 375ml cost me like $13 and change. Alex
Looks good, and looks like a fun project. We make a twice yearly drive up the North Shore to fetch our maple syrup home...
What a cool post! I'm not sure we have the right trees here in Scotland but if we do, I'm having a go at making myself some!
@Colin Geer I think it helps to have snow on the ground in winter for any tree to produce quantities of sap. And it is not specific to maple... 22 Trees That Can Be Tapped For Sap And Syrup
That is one of the best posts I've seen in a while. Maple Syrup made on a Coleman stove. Excellent. I saw a program once on television where they were pouring maple syrup on to snow. It would solidify and then they'd eat it like candy. No snow where I live so I've never tried it but it looked like fun and I know it tasted great. Ben
I can see I'm going to have to tap the silver maple here in my back yard next year! The tree is three trees from one massive trunk, reaches about 90 feet over the yard and house! The wife's cousin had a maple syrup operation in north central Wisconsin, over 500 trees, with vacuum lines for sap gathering, plus what he purchases from the Amish in his area. Come this time of year, the gas fired evaporators are going like there's no tomorrow, and the burner exhaust stacks begin to glow a dull orange in the evenings. We were discussing using vacuum evaporators, to concentrate the sugars to a syrup at a much lower heat, to reduce caramelization of the sugar, and keeping a light golden color to the finished product. Problem was, it worked too well. The sugars were concentrated, but without the hear and carmelization and subsequent reformation of sugars, it lost the rich flavors that his product was known for. We tried this on a very small scale, as a laboratory test, as not to disrupt the main run, and were very happy we did it that way! Murph
You can make 2 grades of sirup. If you stop to boil when the sirup is golden, it mean that you can use the sirup for cooking. Otherwise you do like @Blueflame shows to have a sirup to add on anything you like without warning up the sirup. @z1ulike if you make a block of ice like 1 foot long and you grains some ice to put over your block, you will have the same result as if it was snow. Then add the Brown dark sirop on the block and roll it on something to enjoy. Have fun
