I have been anxiously waiting for maple syrup season to start since it ended last year. We’ve been doing maple syrup for a couple of years now but last year we started taking things more seriously with an eye to start selling the syrup this year as our first farm product. We used last year as a sort of trial run and were happy with the outcome so this year we decided to step up our game by tapping twice as many trees. We tapped 40 trees on March 2nd this year…
The weather was right above freezing and it was sunny so some of the taps started to run a little bit but I wasnt expecting much at this point. The weather for the following week was set to be in the 40s so I wanted to make sure we got the taps in before the sap really started running. With the trees tapped I turned my attention to getting the equipment ready for processing the sap.
Last year I spent a lot of time researching different evaporators. The first year we made maple syrup we did it in a huge pot over a propane burner. While it worked it was slow and used a ton of gas so we knew we had to step up our evaporator game in order for production to scale. After a lot of research I found Smoky Lake Maple products and was thrilled to realize they were based in Hilbert Wisconsin (only about 4 hours from the farm).
Last year we bought their small evaporator, the StarCat, and really enjoyed using it – it made the evaporation of the sap so much more efficient. So to prepare for Maple Syrup season this year I made another pilgrimage to Smoke Lake Maple to buy bottles, a steam bottler, a feed tank, and a couple other things from them…
What I love about Smoky Lake is that the folks there are so helpful and knowledgeable. I could have spent all morning in there talking to them (and Im sure they would have happily talked to me that whole time but my Midwest decency told me I should let them get back to work so I only stayed for half an hour).
With the pilgrimage completed I headed back to the farm to see what sort of sap we had collected from the tapping we did the week prior. Out of the 40 trees we had tapped a week earlier we had about 22 gallons of sap. That’s not enough to even make a full gallon of syrup (the ratio is 40:1) but I didn’t want it to go to waste so we spent half a day this past weekend boiling it down. It gave us a chance to test out the new feed pan for the evaporator as well…
In previous years we had tried a variety of ways of adding sap to the evaporator pan. Initially we were just dumping it in but when you do that you drop the temp too much and the boil takes time to recover. We then started preheating sap in a big pot over a fire and while that helped we were still adding in a lot of sap at once to the pan. The feed pan for our evaporator holds 2.5 gallons and sits directly on top of the evaporator pan. The idea is that the steam can help preheat the sap but I think the bigger advantage is that it lets you slowly add sap to the boil. In doing this you can have a constant feed of syrup so long as you keep the evaporation rate fairly constant. So far we love it and it’s made the process even easier.
This week we’re supposed to hit temps in the 50-70s so I think the sap will really be flowing so stay tuned for more posts where I’ll talk about the bottling process and our new steam bottler from Smoky Lake as well!
2 Comments
Rich Luxton · March 10, 2025 at 9:23 pm
If I remember, I will try to see if my DVD copy of Cathy’s father’s farm from years ago still plays; I say that because whenever I encounter a mp4 video on line my system has trouble playing it…too much change for this coot!
Anyway, her father toured his modest farm in the UP where he made his syrup, the old fashioned way. Wood fire, looked like about 4×6-8′ evaporator pan and God knows what little improvised else. So, as I look at your stainless setup, listen to your laments about the rate of processing, I think of him and other forest and farm producers of years ago. If I recall right* he said it took him over 8 hours to reduce a pan-full.
Keep in mind this is said with all due respect, as I simply buy my maple syrup (the generous UP folks have all gone)
BUT it is an absolute necessity when pannakakua is served!!!
Rich Luxton
*Unlikely to be an accurate recollection.
Jon · March 13, 2025 at 2:52 pm
It is a time consuming process but I love doing it! I think this year we’re evaporating about 4-5 gallons per hour (a guess – I should keep better track of this) but I’m already looking forward to finding more ways to optimize that next year. I was just reading about some folks who use reverse osmosis water filtering systems to pull a lot of the water out of the sap before the process it. Sounds a little too high tech for me – I rather like the natural process process of evaporating it all :)