Tree Taping Time

I think we are all starting to come out of our hibernation a little lately.  Even though there is a bit of snow on the ground the trees are starting to wake up.  This week, depending on the weather, we will be tapping a few of our maple trees.  We're waiting for the temperature changes to be just right.  Maple sap flows when daily highs are above freezing and nightly lows are below freezing consistently.

Last year we were able to freeze a bit of sap that we recently boiled down into syrup.  It took nearly 3 gallons of sap and about 5 hours to make 3/4 of a bottle of syrup.  

It was really an easy process. We simply filled a large pot with sap, put it on the stove, set up a fan to blow the moisture away from the cabinetry and let it boil.

The syrup is a little cloudy because we didn't bother to filter it.  It has a very rich and creamy maple flavor a bit like maple fudge with a slight chocolaty flavor in there somewhere. The results are wonderful and far better than I had expected.