First in a three-part series

Last year about this time some people I know decided it would be fun to try their hands at making maple syrup, and building on the “fun” theme, talked about organizing a neighborhood sap boil. It did sound like fun. But the people were Harvard friends of mine, and I live in Bolton. It didn’t seem like a good idea to trek sap from our house to Harvard to be boiled.

Sap buckets hang off a maple on Depot Road. (Photo by Sue Fitterman)

Making maple syrup sounded intriguing, though, and we do have a few maple trees in our yard. It also offered a good way to get out of the house in the winter, an alternative to skating, sledding, and shoveling snow. Conditions were ideal, with temperatures below freezing at night, and in the 40s during the day. So I bought four taps at a local hardware store, and my husband and I rigged up sap collection buckets using gallon milk jugs. Within two weeks we’d collected 10 to 15 gallons of sap, and were ready to boil it down. Since this was a spur-of-the-moment project to start with, we hadn’t thought through this part of it—how we were going to boil down the sap. Undaunted, we dragged out a seldom-used charcoal grill and early on a Saturday morning fired it up using scraps of pine and bark from the woods near our barn. We pulled up two chairs fireside, and proceeded to enjoy a sunny winter’s day.

The picture I took of my husband late that afternoon offered insight into the amount of fun we were having. There he sat, soot-covered, next to a smoky grill, with a charcoal-smudged nose and a half-hearted smile. That may have been about the time he realized there was no way we were going to finish boiling all that sap in one day and would have to sit by the smoky fire the whole next day as well. When you boil sap on a grill, we discovered, you have to keep taking the pot off to replenish the fire, then bring the sap back to a boil. In the shallow fire pit of a grill, a wood fire doesn’t last long. And, we realized, you need a lot of wood. My husband made several trips up to the woods with our yard cart to fetch more pine branches and bark scraps.

We decided to stop adding sap to the pot (which, by the way, was very well-blackened by this time) somewhere around 3 p.m., and when there were about two inches of light brown sap left in the pan, we took it into the house to do the finishing. Then the big question occurred to us: how do we know when it’s done? Directions I found on the Internet talked about it being done when it sheeted off a spoon in a certain way. A friend we called said that when it gets to the point where it starts foaming, it’s done. I put a candy thermometer in the pot so I could gauge how close it was to becoming candy.

Somehow, when our two-day sap boil was over, we ended up with almost two pints of usable maple syrup. The batch from day one was far too thick—about the consistency of caramel ice cream topping. The batch from day two was too runny. (We didn’t want to repeat our day-one mistake.) But we mixed the two together, and it was pretty good.

When I offered a taste of our amber gold to my son, who had stopped by with my grandson for a visit, he wrinkled his nose.

“Ugh! That’s too sweet!” he said.

“You know,” he added, “they have this stuff at the grocery store—I forget what aisle it’s in—but it’s shaped like a woman, Mrs. Something-or-other—oh, right—Mrs. Butterworth’s!”

As I was scrubbing the thick coat of soot from the stainless steel stock pot we’d used for the boil, wondering what kind of a mother I’d been that my son preferred fake syrup to the real thing, I made lots of mental notes about what we would do differently next year—yes, we’d definitely be doing this again.

Next: Learning along the way