Once you have collected your sap, all you need to do for syrup is boil it! Boiling will evaporate the water in the sap and take the sugar concentration from 2% to about 67%. Generally, it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. The finished color of your syrup can vary from a light amber to a rich dark brown depending on when the sap was collected and many other circumstantial factors. Sap collected early in the season usually yields a lighter colored syrup with a milder flavor, whereas sap collected later creates a darker, bolder tasting product. A beginner can boil the sap on a stove top or over a flame from a turkey fryer. If you have several gallons to boil down, it is best done outside. The water you are boiling off has to go somewhere and you don’t want it collecting on the walls and windows in your house. Larger producers use shallow, flat pans or commercially produced evaporators fueled by a wood fire or other heat source. Ideally, you create as much surface area for the steam to blow off as possible with your pan. Maintain a hard boil on the sap until you reach 67% sugar. This point is determined with a hydrometer which measures the specific gravity of the product. If you don’t have one, you will have to pay close attention to the bubbles from boiling. Once they turn yellow and begin to build, you have created syrup. If you boil the sap too long, the sap can burn or begin to crystallize into maple sugar (another delicious treat and perhaps another article).

Now that you have concentrated the sap to syrup, you will need to filter the product. At this point, it is very cloudy due to the ‘maple sand’ that has been created. This ‘sand ‘ is not harmful as it is purely crystallized nutrients like calcium, magnesium, and other trace elements found in the tree’s sap, but it does look unappealing and can be gritty. The hot syrup is run through a very fine filter to yield the clear product we are familiar with. Once filtered, it should be hot packed into a clean suitable container. Like honey, maple syrup will keep almost indefinitely.

I have been making syrup for several years and it seems to have become a hobby gone awry. I end up tapping more and more trees each year. A lot of work goes into making syrup, but I love the satisfaction of producing a hand-crafted, completely natural product. I collect my sap from natural strands of Sugar Maples growing at the Johnson’s Nursery tree farm in Jackson and craft it over a hardwood fire. Twelve ounce containers of my More Steam! brand are available for purchase at the nursery.