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As you step out of the double doors of our gift store/candy kitchen, you look straight out across the valley where you view the largest of our sugar bushes. We collect sap from approximately 3000 tapholes, on our own farm, with some trees providing two or more taps. A healthy tree can accept a new taphole each year without harm. Each spring, after the harvest season ends, the holes dry up as the tissue around each hole dies. Over the course of years, the tree covers over the old hole with new wood, leaving a slight scar on the outer bark.
TAPPING OUR TREES
Metal or plastic spiles are pounded into tap holes which have been drilled in the maple trees. Tapholes are 7/16" in diameter by 1 1/2" to 2" deep. They are drilled at a slightly upward slant to insure that the sap will flow down out of the hole, through the spile, into the bucket.SUGARING WITH PLASTIC TUBING
While buckets hanging from trees is an effective means of collecting sap, we find the tubing system of collection to be more efficient. Plastic spiles, replace the wood and metal ones. Plastic tubing replaces the buckets. Our system uses approximately 15 miles of branch line tubing (5/16" diameter) and about two miles of larger mainline tubing similar to ordinary water line leading to your house. Many branch lines will feed into a mainline, over its course down the slope to large collection or holding tanks. Tubing systems may be vented or closed. Systems without much natural slope may use vents, letting air in at each spile, to help prevent vapor locks which inhibit flow through the tubing. With sufficient slope, closed systems, such as we use, provide greater sap yields through the creation of natural or artificial vacuums.
. . . A picture of a maple tree showing a tap and tubing
One last feature of the tubing system worth noting is the use of drop lines. These are the vertical lines that connect the spiles to the branch line. These lines allow the spiles to be moved to new holes around the tree each spring without re-plumbing the line. These lines also allow for the separation of CO2 gas and sap. All plants use carbon dioxide to live and maples are no exception. A large part of what comes from the taphole is CO2 gas which, if not separated from the sap, can contribute to vapor locks, again inhibiting the flow of sap.
This process alone takes several days. After the season, all the tubing must be washed so that the system is sterile at the beginning of the next season. This is done by forcing a disinfectant through the whole system and then rinsing. This process alone takes several weeks. Before the next season the tubing system must all be repaired where necessary and new holes drilled. The biggest problems for the system come from animals like squirrels and deer which damage the tubing in their search for food.
SAP COLLECTION
We have many storage tanks in the various bushes. The mainlines described above, flow into these tanks. The sap in these gathering tanks is pumped out into a gathering tank aboard a truck. It is then driven to a dumping station behind the sugar house. The sap runs by gravity from the truck into more storage tanks.A good sap run will yield 3000 or more gallons per day. In order never to lose one drop, we have a storage capacity of some 6000 gallons. Sap degrades quickly after it leaves the tree. Keeping the sap cool and bacteria free can increase its life. However, this gift of spring usually begins to spoil or ferment within 24 hours and must be processed immediately to make a high quality syrup. The sap is exposed to an ultra-violet light over one tank to kill bacteria and slow fermentation. Screening filters out bits of wood, etc., which might be brought along with the sap.
OUR TRADITIONAL WOOD FIRED EVAPORATOR
The evaporator room is where the syrup is actually made. Maple sap is a colorless liquid, easily mistaken for water, except for a slightly sweet taste (2% to 3% sugar content). It takes 30 to 45 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, depending on the type of sugar bush, the year or the time of the season (early or late). In this room, we boil away enough of the water to go from 2% to 3% sugar in sap to 66% sugar in syrup.
The long, low stove with chimneys is our wood fired evaporator. It evaporates about 240 gallons of water per hour. The fuel wood for the season is stored in the adjoining wood shed. It takes one full cord (4' x 4' x 8') of fully dried hardwoods to fuel the evaparator for 8 hours. If the evaporator were oil fired, it would need 75 gallons of fuel oil to replace that full cord of wood. The evaporator produces approximately 6-7 gallons of syrup per hour of operation. The wood is moved from the woodshed on a trolley rolling on an overhead track.
The evaporator is fired from the firebox near the doors to the woodshed. The fire rushes under the length of the "cooker" to the largest stack at the back. A well-fired evaporator creates little smoke with a slightly "sweet smell" as combustion is quite complete. The sap moves from compartment to compartment in the pans over the fire, gradually thickening as it moves along. The process is continual with sap always coming in and syrup being "drawn off" every 15 minutes or so.
While the pans usually have only about 1 1/2" of liquid in them, the thickened sap tends to foam wildly as it approaches the syrup state and uses the full height of the pans. The covered portion of the larger rear pan is a third pan where the sap enters first. The steam from the pan under it combined with air forced into the sap by a large fan produces the preliminary evaporation at a lower temperature.
This "piggy back" pan is covered by a steam hood. This, combined with a wooden curtain hanging overhead, helps to contain the steam and to direct it to two opened overhead doors which release the water to the sky from which it came.