Ecology

Small scale maple sugaring

Amanda Markle
Strawberry Hill Nature Preserve

(3/2022) I am drowning in sap. It fills my freezer and my fridge. I have partially frozen 5-gallon buckets in various stages of thaw surrounding my desk. My stockpots, soup pots, canning jars, and muffin tins are all filled with sap, and it just keeps coming. My shoulders ache from carrying buckets through the woods, and all my clothes smell like smoke. I have thermometers, hydrometers, and refractometers sitting next to my computer where I frantically research how to use them all properly. It’s maple sugaring season and I am in way over my head.

A year ago, the extent of my maple syrup knowledge was that it made my son’s 3-pancake-a-day habit very expensive. I started working at Strawberry Hill last April, soon after the sugaring season ended. When I asked other staff members about the process, my inquiries were met with vague warnings to prepare for long days, but I assumed that by the time the next sugaring season came around I would be prepared. I was not prepared.

The process of making maple syrup is both incredibly simple and incredibly labor-intensive. All you need to make maple syrup is a maple tree, the right climate, and a heat source. Once you have those three things, it’s just a matter of waiting for the right temperatures, getting the sap out of the tree, and boiling it long enough to turn it into syrup. It’s a process that’s been done for hundreds of years, starting with Native Americans who ingeniously figured out how to concentrate sap into sugar without the aid of metal cookware, freezing the sap to concentrate the sugar content, and utilizing a variety of carefully buffered heat sources.

European colonists learned the process from the indigenous peoples and began using maple sugar as a replacement for the cane sugar, which had to be imported from the West Indies and came with a steep price tag. Around the time of the American Civil War, cane sugar became more readily available, and the production of maple sugar shifted to be more focused on producing maple syrup—though the demand for maple sugar peaked during this same period in some areas where abolitionists urged people to avoid using cane sugar produced by slave labor in one of the earliest known examples of a political boycott. Processing techniques shifted during this era to utilize shallow metal sheet pans for boiling, which greatly decreased the amount of time and energy required to boil the sap down to syrup, but collecting, storing, and processing maple sap was still a huge undertaking.

Commercial maple sugaring took off thanks to technological advancements starting in the 1970s. During this modern maple sugaring renaissance, sugarmakers were finally able to perfect a system of connecting tapped trees to plastic tubing that would run sap to a central processing location, eliminating the need to collect and haul heavy sap from individual and often hard to access trees. Vacuum pumps improved the process even more, and processing times were decreased exponentially through the use of reverse osmosis systems that remove a large amount of water from maple sap before it ever reaches a heat source. Commercial grade evaporators can trap and recycle heat lost in the process of boiling sap, decreasing the amount of energy required to produce syrup.

All these advancements make it possible for us to buy real maple syrup from a store at a (somewhat) reasonable price, but away from the commercial producers, a community of back-yard and hobbyist sugar makers still thrives. Many are now using upgraded evaporator pans, plastic tubing, and even homemade reverse osmosis rigs, but even so, producing maple syrup on a small scale is a laborious process that yields a relatively small reward. Sugarmakers must watch the weather carefully so they tap at just the right moment. Too cold and you can damage the tree- wait too long and you miss out on the best sap flows. Once the buds break, the sap’s chemical composition changes and any syrup produced using it will taste terrible. Sugarmakers must learn and utilize responsible tapping practices- a maple tree, on average, needs to be 45 years old before it’s large enough to start tapping. Properly cared-for trees can be tapped for 100 years or more, but If you damage your trees by overtapping or not giving them space to heal from year to year, it’s going to be a long wait for any new ones you plant to be ready for maple sugaring. Sap storage can be a huge challenge for the backyard sugarmaker. Sap spoils quickly if not kept cold. A dozen tapped trees and a warm spell can easily leave you scrambling to find freezer space for upwards of 20 gallons of sap in a single day. Once you are ready to process, there are endless techniques, calculations, and expensive pieces of equipment you can use to make sure you are boiling reaches exactly the right temperature to make syrup.

I’m now about halfway through my first maple sugaring season producing as a hobbyist and environmental educator, and I am exhausted. The process, start to finish, is so much more time-consuming and physically taxing than I had expected it to be. Is it worth all these long hours and all this hard work to make what will eventually become just a few gallons of syrup? Absolutely. Maple syrup produced in your backyard is worlds apart from what you buy in the store. The flavor will be unique to your individual process, affected by climate, soil type, what stage of the sugaring season your sap comes from, and your processing techniques. All that effort to collect, haul, and store your sap makes it taste that much sweeter once you’ve boiled away 97% of it.

The sense of accomplishment that’s come with producing our small batch of syrup would itself make the process worthwhile, but the best part of this epic sugaring saga has been the sense of community it’s built. Maple sugaring is best done as a group activity. Many hands helping to carry sap and stoke fires make the work a lot easier. Trying to keep all that sap cold has encouraged us to get to know our neighbors (and their fridge capacity) better. Long hours of processing leads to long talks and time to spend together working towards a common goal. We’ve connected with so many people who have stepped up to give advice and share stories of their own experiences backyard sugaring, a tradition that’s often been passed down from generation to generation. Now we get to share the tradition with the hundreds of people who will be coming to Strawberry Hill over the next few weeks to learn about maple sugaring. Hopefully, at least a few of them will go on to try their hand at sugaring in their own backyards. The community will continue to grow, and every hard-earned ounce of maple syrup they produce will be worth its weight in gold.

Amanda Markle is the Environmental Education Manager of the Strawberry Hill Foundation. Strawberry Hill inspires stewardship of our natural world by
connecting the community with educational opportunities.
 Learn more by visiting StrawberryHill.org.