Maple Tree Tapping

The process of making Maple Syrup began many years ago for me. My father was a do it all kind of man. He was teacher, coach, and owned a restaurant. During the period of owning a restaurant in the 70's, he had a teacher friend who owned over 1000 acres of land a few miles away from St.Clair. The land was actually closer to Meramac State Park in Sullivan. On this land, I hunted squirrels as a teenager and dad would take me and my brothers deer hunting. My brother Ed still hunts on that property today with family friends.

They had a great deal of Sugar Maple trees on property with that amount of acreage. Dad would tap the trees and would use large cooper cooking kettles to boil the sap down. It would take hours and hours to boil this sap down to golden brown delicious home made maple syrup. Great fun sharing time with his friend Martin telling stories and getting away from the day to day troubles that owning a business can bring.

My 2nd brother Delmar built a sap boiler in shop class. Just a side note Delmar works for an industrial sheet metal company and did a little work on our greenhouse shaping a small vent for the heat system. He's also worked on many District clubhouses installing new duct work in remodeling projects. The shop class was taught by his friend Martin who was the owner of the property dad would extract the maple sap from the trees. The boiler had a large rectangle container on top which would hold up to 100 gallons of sap. This was quite the apparatus. It would also not scorch the sap quite as easily as happened on the open flame and copper pots. Our most successful run of maple syrup involved using this boiler. We had over 4.5 gallons of pure gold made. Before he used the large boiler, we would open a bottle and tell mom the syrup didn't taste very good and mom would say well dad must of scorched this batch.

Okay, enough of the story telling, now on to present day. Both my Brothers Delmar and Superintendent Ed tapped trees with dad over the years and since on their own with dad being gone almost 27 years. I had never been involved in tapping trees. Finally got the bug when I came to Glen Echo and decided I wanted to do something for the membership and I've done it ever since.

There's a nice link to an article on how sap flow works in a tree for those of you who are interested. Tap the link below.

Maple Tree Sap Flow

We normally have about a 2 week window to tap trees in our area. Temperatures need to be above 32 degrees during the day and below 32 degrees at night. The transition zone creates pretty big swings in temperatures which are different than the northern or eastern climates where maple syrup production are much higher. If we make a large enough supply, Chef will sometimes make it available for a breakfast buffet during the season or will prepare a entree or dessert with the syrup during the season.

We have about 12 trees tapped including a couple in my backyard which produce a great deal of sap.

Below is a video of the tapping process.