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!