Talk to me about tapping a tree ,,,,,,,,

I do exactly what you describe. I have five trees tapped right now and I'll get 4-5 gallons of sap per tree each week for about a month. I boil every weekend during the season on a 55 gallon drum with two steam table pans (link below). It takes all day to boil it down to about a gallon. Then I bring it home and finish it on the stove where I can control the heat better. It's a labor of love but every time I have some syrup it amazes me how good it tastes. DO NOT BOIL THE WHOLE THING IN YOUR HOUSE OR YOU'LL HAVE STICKY EVERYTHING.

My system is to fill each pan about halfway while the fire gets going. The rear pan tends to get more heat so I use the front for warming and just ladle it into the rear pan as it gets low, then I add more to the front. I added a small pan that sort of sits on top as a pre-warming pan. It works a lot better if you can keep the boil going vs having to bring it to a boil over and over. Make sure it's level or any part of the pan that doesn't have sap in it will start to caramelize and burn very quickly.

Freezing doesn't matter. I usually have a bunch of ice in the buckets just to make boiling it even slower. Once I tried setting my collection bucket a little closer to the stove and all I did was start melting the bucket.

Last year the weather seemed perfect, but I had a very poor yield. You cannot go two weeks or the sap will spoil.

This fall I brought the stove back home, cut off the broken cast iron legs and welded on some rebar legs, so now it stands up at a more serviceable height. I lined the inside with bricks last year but never really got to see how they did because I was getting about half the sap I normally get. Fingers crossed for this year.

I keep saying I'm going to build something better, but this makes enough for me. I find it to be a really nice way to wind out the last month of winter.

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Man, this week was a bust. I had about a gallon per tree and it was frozen solid. I tried to dump one because I don't like keeping it more than a week and it wouldn't budge. So hopefully next week it'll be better and not spoiled. I was kind of glad there wasn't much sap because the wind was whipping and it would have been miserable standing in the wind all day.
 
Well I think I collected exactly 0 sap this week. One of the tubes fell out of a bucket the other week and after fixing it last weekend that bucket was still empty. My options this week were to dump it all or boil and see what I get. I bet I had 4 gallons of sap total, all frozen solid. I finished it on the stove this morning and got about 12oz, which makes sense. It was too bad because yesterday was a beautiful day for boiling.

The weather this week is supposed to be warmer during the day and 20s at night, so maybe I'll do better next weekend. We had a lot of single digit night temps that I think put the brakes on sap flow.

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it is a good idea to plug the hole in the tree at the end of the season to prevent insects and disease from killing the tree. It will happen from one 1/2” hole.
 
VTHunter said:
Yes. One can get steam pans from resturant.com on the cheap. These pans have more flat area than a pot. The more surface area, the better the evaporation rate. I attached some cheap cabinet handles to make life easier. Here is a better picture showing the pans - and my messy yard.
One other suggestion... if you plan on doing this year after year, fill the block with sand. It will help control heat. You may also consider fire brick.

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Sweet set up 👍🏻👍🏻
 
CTtrapper said:
it is a good idea to plug the hole in the tree at the end of the season to prevent insects and disease from killing the tree. It will happen from one 1/2” hole.
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This is generally not recommended. The tree will heal itself. Plugging it traps any foreign material in there and is more likely to hurt the tree. I just pull my taps at the end of the season and try to tap somewhere else on the tree next year.

I am not an arborist.
 
mousegunguy said:
I let the sap freeze in the bigger storage barrels. Ice is just frozen water. Pick out the ice and toss it. Less water to boil off.
Big chunks of ice make awesome reactive air rifle targets
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My 5 gallon buckets will freeze solid. Even if not completely solid, the "ice" is sweet. I don't think the sap separates; I just think the freezing point drops like salt water.
 
ToddDubya said:
This is generally not recommended. The tree will heal itself. Plugging it traps any foreign material in there and is more likely to hurt the tree. I just pull my taps at the end of the season and try to tap somewhere else on the tree next year.

I am not an arborist.
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I dont know. Ive seen it written a lot to plug but never read otherwise. I’m sure it is, just never read that.
However, I can look out my bedroom window and see a maple w disease that started after it was tapped years ago. I never plugged the hole.
im not sure what foreign matter you’d plug into the tree in the winter. When the hole is leaking in the spring though the carpenter ants can Follow it right up and in.
 
mousegunguy said:
I let the sap freeze in the bigger storage barrels. Ice is just frozen water. Pick out the ice and toss it. Less water to boil off.
Big chunks of ice make awesome reactive air rifle targets
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All for reactive targets but as others have said that ice contains sugar. You're throwing away your hard work
 
Omahastylin16 said:
All for reactive targets but as others have said that ice contains sugar. You're throwing away your hard work
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There may be a very small amount of sugar in the ice but water freezes before sugar water so the ice on top is far and away mostly water.
Even if I am tossing a tiny bit of sugar ( I mostly don’t make syrup) the sap was not really work to collect & it saves me the work off prepping more wood to boil off with.
 
Another small batch again this week. The trees were running okay yesterday but maybe the small yield is because I only collected from Sunday to Friday. I'm still only getting about 1/4 to 1/3 of what I expect to get.

On the left is what I got this week, and the right is what's left of last week's batch. You can see how much darker it is already.

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It's too bad I'm not getting much sap. Last year I added about 90 bricks to the inside of my evaporator to help keep the heat from going out the sides and act as a baffle to prevent the heat from just going directly up the chimney. Once it gets going, it really does a nice job. But by that point it doesn't have to run much longer before I'm out of sap and starting to shut it down. Start to finish yesterday was about 3 hours.
 
We boiled today on our 2x3 evaporator and will be continuing again tomorrow as I have another 60 gallons of sap left to go. Started off with the propane heated pot, moved on to a barrel stove, and ended up with a small sugar shack and 2x3 to get out of the weather.
 

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This summer I'm thinking about making at least a roof over my stove. I can typically pick good days to boil, but I've been out in the rain at 9pm trying to finish that last bit before heading home. I now have shelter for myself, but it would be nice to not have to wait for the stove to cool enough that I can fill the pans with snow and not worry about them burning. One time I made the mistake of not leaving the pans on the stove and I came back to a stove full of snow and ice.

@ACfarmer What do you have for the 2x3?
 

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jek said:
Didn’t it flow out of the tree in freezing weather? Why do you think it will freeze?
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The sap runs up during the day when it’s warm and down to the roots when it gets cold. Flowing down below the soil level insulates the sap and prevents freezing.
This up and down flow is what we are tapping into when we gather sap.
This is also why there is a narrow window to collect sap. Warm days, cold nights keep the sap flowing.
 
This week I had the amount of sap I expect to get, about 4 gallons per tree. So 20 gallons to boil for about half a gallon of syrup. Compared to 12 oz the first week and barely more than that the second week, this was a welcome change. The weather yesterday was beautiful: warm, sunny, spent the day in a tshirt.

To continue the color comparison, here are jars from the first three weeks.

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I noticed the middle jar has some material settling out of it. I forget what that's called, but I think it's just harmless minerals. It can be filtered out if you care, which I don't.

For fun, here's the bum view I had as the sun set. A week ago this was all covered in snow.

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Sugar sand.

As for the ice containing sugar, as the ice crystals form, they force out impurtities (in this case sugar). If the ice is "slushy" or white, there's a lot of air in it and it's not "solid", so it's not been able to force out the sugar molecules.

I saw a thing on the ice-making companies that sell it to the Amish - a big ice form is lowered into cold brine, and ice forms. just before it becomes solid, they take the ice block out, and pour out the still-liquid center, and rinse it. The then put it back, and fill it with fresh water and let it all freeze solid. Apparently the Amish don't like cloudy ice.
 
Boiled again this morning and have about ~1.5 gallons of dark to filter before bottling it. Fought foam most of the morning as well.
 

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The tree buds are swelling up here so it was time to pull our taps this afternoon and start cleaning up.
 
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Didn't get to tap this year ,,,,, work is pressing again with people out and shifts to be covered again ,,,,, next year hopefully , going to mark out the maples this summer anyway.
 
I know I am a little late to the party but in Northern NH it’s 25 at night and 45 during the day I am up here for work 4 days so I tapped 5 trees 1649016090358.jpeg
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