Third in a three-part series

My husband found his calling this winter; I now call him the Maple King.

I realized how serious he had become about making maple syrup when he insisted on spending a Sunday recently sitting and watching sap boil in front of the makeshift cinder-block fire pit we had set up in the middle of the garden—which, due to recent rain and melting snow, had become a veritable mud bog.

Bottles of syrup drawn off at various times of boiling offer a chance to sample the syrup. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)

Periodically he would get up and check the eight milk jugs we had suspended from maple trees in our yard, to see how the sap collection was coming. When he bemoaned the fact that the jugs were once again full, leaving him with about 18 gallons of sap to boil down, I reminded him we could stop at any time.

“We can just take out those taps and plug up the holes,” I said.

But he mumbled something about taking advantage of the sap while it was running, and went back to sit in front of the fire.

We had set out our taps in early February, on a weekend when the daytime temperature had hit 40 and nighttime temperatures were below freezing—ideal conditions for a sap run. We had our equipment ready—the plastic milk-jug sap collectors, the taps, extra plastic milk jugs to store the sap, a hydrometer with a hydrometer cup, and an ice skimmer from my husband’s ice-fishing days to use in skimming off the foam on the boiling sap. We had built a temporary fire pit in the middle of our frozen garden, using cinder blocks, bricks, and racks that we salvaged from an appliance graveyard. We purchased a stainless steel turkey roaster pan we found at a closeout sale to use as an evaporator pan, and we fashioned a “piggyback pan” out of a metal colander lined with tinfoil.

The hydrometer and hydrometer cup are handy gadgets I learned about in January in a workshop at the Northeast Organic Farmers Association’s winter conference. The hydrometer is made of glass and looks like a big thermometer. The slender top has several markings on it, the most important being the two red lines marked “hot test” and “cold test.” The wider bottom contains a weight. The hydrometer cup is a long, thin metal tube with a flat bottom and a handle. During the “finish” boil of a pot of sap, as the sap approaches doneness, you hold the tube over the pot, fill it with sap, using a ladle, and gently lower the hydrometer into the cup. The syrup is done when the hydrometer bounces to the surface, at the level of the red line marked “hot test.” To gauge how close the sap was to being done, I used a candy thermometer, watching for the temperature to rise above the boiling point of water, and I also watched the boiling sap very closely. When the little bubbles covered the surface of the liquid, rather than just the edges, and it began to look like syrup, I started testing it, and it eventually reached the point where it was done, based on the hydrometer reading.

I think it was the allure of our first successful batch of maple syrup this year that got my husband hooked. We ended up with a little more than a pint of syrup to show for our efforts that weekend. That was about a month ago; he has been boiling sap every weekend since. He hasn’t been put off by the ratio of sap to syrup—about 40 to 1, or the rate at which it boils down—about six to eight gallons a day. And he hasn’t been discouraged by the soot-blackened pan needing to be cleaned at the end of the day.

I’ll have to admit that boiling sap isn’t such a bad way to spend a winter’s weekend.

I recall one particular Saturday a few weeks ago, when we sat around our cinder-block hearth (before the garden turned to mud), basking in the warmth of the fire while the crisp winter air reddened our cheeks. We became mesmerized by the bubbling sap, which gradually turned beige as the day progressed. Every few minutes one of us put more wood on the fire or poured more sap into the piggyback pan. Periodically my husband hauled the yard cart up to the woodpile for another load of wood. We took turns breaking for lunch, and late in the afternoon I went in the house to make some hot chocolate, to cap off what I thought was a fine winter’s day.

After four weekends of boiling sap, we had more than a half gallon of syrup, stored in half-pint jars in the pantry. (We might have had more, but there was the ice cream, and then the ham, and then the corn fritters, all begging for a touch of maple syrup, and of course, we had to oblige.)

Last week we stopped by Jim Burns’ sugar shack on Ayer Road, to see how a pro does it. We’ll probably never boil sap on the scale of Jim’s operation, but we took away some pointers to help us get a more efficient burn from our makeshift fire pit and boil more than eight gallons in a day.

I think we have it down to a science now. We’ll definitely be ready next year when the approach of spring sets the sap running.