Maple Syrup | Part 3

Once the syrup gets to a very dark colour, we start using the hydrometer to measure the thickness so that we can tell whether it's syrup yet or not. 

We all love smelling it, can you tell? :)

Adding syrup to the hydrometer 

Measuring . . .

It's almost syrup!! 

Checking some more

Oh yeah, forgot one very important detail. It is very sticky in the kitchen when we're finishing off the syrup :P

And this is our filter. It causes so much stress. . . :P

It can NOT move. It needs to be in the centre, 'cause if it's not, the syrup drips out the side of our coffee urn. That's why the chairs need to be balanced out, which is why we're stacking hymnbooks, my very thick English binder (all those essays and paragraphs. . . :P), a Webster dictionary, and a history book on the chairs.
The outside filter is extremely thick wool, so the syrup goes through rather slowly. The hotter the syrup is, the faster it goes through the filter. But the syrup gets cold very quickly, so then it just clogs up the filter and we have syrup stuck in the filter. So then we have to take out one of the thinner, inside filters to clear stuff up a bit.

Everything has to be done very quickly so that the syrup has less time to cool and so that the container doesn't overflow.

So now we've kinda figured out a system.

Mom pours,

I (most of the time) fill up the bottles,

and Tiger Lily screws on the rings and caps.

Let's just say that finishing off the syrup is a very, very stressful time. (keeping it real here ;P) It's all rushed to get everything done quickly without spilling a single precious drop :) But this year we've actually relaxed. . . a bit. Well, anyway, enough to let Dare Devil help with the filling up of the bottles. We wouldn't even have dreamed of letting this (dangerous) guy help out before. :P

And then to seal the bottles, we lay the 125mL, 500mL, and 1 L bottles on their sides, and the 125mL bottles upside down.

Tiger Lily taking separating the filters

This picture speaks for itself :P

No, that's not a ton of syrup stuck in the filter! 

It's actually niter, some icky sticky gooey stuff that is produced whenever
the syrup is boiled to a certain temperature. It won't harm you, but it's not good to eat.
Very sandy and gritty. 

Mom was nice and put it all neatly on a plate so that I could take a
picture of it. Anyone want a niter pancake? :P

Of course, after we're all done, some of us want to lick the remaining syrup from all the spoons and cups and things. I mean, who wouldn't? :P

Tiger Lily: May I have some syrup?
Mom: . . . . . . . . . . . . .   :D

She got her way in the end :)

The finished product!

This bottle below shows the actual colour of the syrup. It's way lighter than the bottles above!

And that's it! I hope you all enjoyed these posts! :)

Day #44 | Maple Sugar

Maple Syrup | Part 2

Sorry for the huge delay in this post. It got "lost" among all my other posts and since I didn't see it, I kept thinking that I had already posted this! :P Oops! 

Here's the first post that I did on maple syrup. 

Maple Syrup | Part 1

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It's time to collect the sap! Sap collecting is fun. . . so long as the weather is nice. :) Basically, all we need to do is go to a bucket, take it down or remove the lid (depending on which bucket it is), and pour the sap that's inside into our "collecting buckets". 

Once there's enough sap, Mom starts up the fire and begins to boil!

Here's our evaporator. No fire in it yet :P

The sap pretty much looks like water.

Boiling sap smells so good! It reminds me of spring.  It's warm and sweet and I don't really know how else to describe it. . .

The sap needs to boil for a very long time. Or anyway, until it turns dark and thick like syrup. In the picture below, it shows the different stages of the sap boiling. At the very back is the pan of fresh sap. It slowly gets darker and darker. 

 When the sap has boiled down to this colour/thickness, Mom usually lets us drink some. I would describe it as drinking liquid gold, it's so good! Hot, smooth, sweet, liquid just sliding down your throat. It's making my mouth water just thinking about it! :)

After tons of boiling (I'm not exaggerating) we end up with something like this. Pretty yucky looking, isn't it? 

So then we filter it out and bring the sap-that's-closer-to-syrup (Mom calls it near-up) inside and finish the boiling here. Usually, the ratio is forty litres of sap to 1 litre of syrup. So about 2 of our  white buckets. That means that there really isn't that much sugar content in the sap and we need to boil out all the "water" that's in there to get the thick syrup.

And then we boil. . .

And boil. . .

And boil some more!

Maple Syrup | Part 1

Here it is! For the past few days I've been trying to capture photos of the maple syrup process. These posts will (hopefully :)) show how we tap our trees and get the delicious syrup from them. 

So here is Part 1. . .

The very first thing we need to do when getting ready to tap our trees is figure out when the weather is just right. Cold nights (below 0) and warm days (above 0) are ideal. 

Once the weather is OK to tap in, we get our drill, hammer, spiles (aka taps), tubes, buckets, pliers, lids, scissors, "Fridge", and evaporator ready. 

The Fridge is a big barrel that is covered up well with snow. It's a very deep barrel and past years have found us inside it with a pot trying to scoop up sap. No pictures of that yet, but trust me, we looked ridiculous! :P

After that, we choose the trees that we want to tap. This year we tapped mostly trees that we had done  last time. Now the holes don't close up really fast and disappear after one or two years. So when we were tapping, we found a whole bunch of old holes. Rules for tapping say that we need to drill at least 3 inches away from an old or new hole. Also, we need to drill on a flat part of a tree. Once the perfect spot is found, we turn on the drill and, after angling it the slightest bit, we go in! On good days, the sap will start coming out almost immediately. 

Then we take our spile and hammer it in, well. If we don't do it properly, the sap leaks out below the spile and you DON'T want that!

Then we attach a bucket to the hook and add a lid/cover.

We also did a few tubed taps. The process is the same for tapping, we only add tubes to the spiles instead and lead it into a big white bucket.

And after we tap as many trees as we need/want, we wait. . .

I'll stop there for now. Got to go organize the next set of pictures! 

If there are any questions, feel free to ask! Either Mom, Tiger Lily, or I will be happy to answer them! :)