How to Make Maple Syrup

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Tapping trees to make maple syrup has a long history in North America. Why not give it a try yourself this spring? iStockphoto.com/Mike Sonnenberg

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Envision a steaming stack of fluffy pancakes on your breakfast plate, warm butter and sweet maple syrup dripping off the edges. Now imagine how good it all would taste with your own homemade, old-fashioned syrup pouring from the pitcher. Can you say “yummy”? Believe it or not, even you can make your own pure maple syrup – and the reward is sweet, indeed.

“So you’re really going to drill into the tree?” That question – posed by my wife – caused me to hesitate for a few moments as I contemplated plunging a 7/16-inch drill bit into one of the silver maples that grace our backyard. Undeterred by the lack of confidence in her tone, I angled my drill bit at a slight incline and drilled a hole about two inches deep into the trunk of the tree. Pulling a metal spout, or “spile,” out of my pocket, I tapped the spile into the drilled hole, and within seconds I was rewarded with a drop of clear fluid that I hoped would eventually end up on a stack of warm pancakes.

While many people associate maple syrup production with vast forests of maple trees, it only takes a few trees to produce enough syrup for personal consumption. Anyone who is somewhat handy, possesses some basic tools and has access to a few suitable trees can make her own maple syrup.

It is interesting to note that maple syrup and maple sugar are some of the oldest agricultural commodities produced in the United States. The art of making maple syrup in the Americas is generally attributed to Native Americans, who passed on those skills to early European settlers.

Native Americans harvested maple syrup by gashing maple trees with an ax and collecting the sap in bark baskets. They then allowed the sap to partially freeze to remove some of the water as ice and concentrate the sugars. To process the sap into syrup or sugar, they boiled the sap down further over an open flame or by dropping hot rocks into the containers that held the sap. Traveling to the “sugar bush,” an area with heavy concentrations of maple trees, was an annual early spring event that was crucial to the Native American hunter/gatherer existence. Many families or clans returned to the same sugar bush every year for generations.

Even though the process of producing syrup is essentially the same as that practiced by Native Americans – gathering sap and boiling it down into syrup – we have made it more efficient over time.

Where to start

To make maple syrup, you need to have access to sap-producing trees. Although the sugar maple tree – also known as rock or hard maple – is the predominate and best producer of maple syrup, red maple, silver maple and even the common box elder tree may be used to gather sap. According to a bulletin from the University of Maine Cooperative Extension entitled “How to Tap Maple Trees and Make Maple Syrup” (www.UMExt.Maine.edu/onlinepubs/PDFpubs/7036.pdf), before tapping, a tree needs to be at least 10 inches in diameter when measured 4½ feet above the ground. The bulletin also states that trees between 10 and 20 inches in
diameter should have no more than one tap per tree. A second tap may be added to trees between 20 and 25 inches in diameter. Trees more than 25 inches in diameter can sustain three taps; however, no tree should ever have more than three taps inserted.

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