We are making our own maple syrup this year. Really. I gave Austin 8 taps for Christmas, and he put them out today, attached to gallon jugs to start collecting the sap. By the end of the day we already had 4 gallons of sap.
Sugar maples don't grow well in our part of Virginia but apparently you can tap any variety of maple, and a couple other types of trees as well. What our property is lacking in sugar maple, it makes up with gigantic old silver maples, and so our maple syrup experiment is in business.
Apparently it takes about 10 gallons of sap to make a quart of syrup, which means we have to figure out how to store all these gallons of sap in a cold place before undertaking the monumental task of boiling it all down to make syrup. Austin bought a food grade 5 gallon bucket for the storage task, but we filled just about the whole thing up in one day. Hmmmm.
Also yet to be determined is exactly how to boil the sap down as there is a burn ban in effect in Virginia, and you really need to boil the sap outdoors so that all the moisture boiled off isn't released into the house. One solution would to build a cinder-block enclosure so that the fire can be technically argued to be enclosed, but that stills begs the question of what type of container to use. Anything from inside the kitchen would get fouled up with the creosote of the fire, and you also need something with a lot of surface area.
I'll let you know how all of this goes!
