Sap! — Cupcake Afloat

So this week Ellen found out it’s not just sugar maples that produce sap that can be boiled down to make syrup. As an experiment I tapped our two Norway maples to see what we would get.

Went to the Tru-Value Hardware store in Wiscasset on my way home from court on Monday and picked up three shiny new spiles. (Bonus: I get to say “spiles.”)

Drilled the holes and tapped in the spiles (there it is again). I was astonished at how fast the sap started flowing and how much came out.

We only have two maples on our property (actually I’m not certain one of them is even on our property, but we’ve been working on adversely possessing a vacant abutting lot for years, this act is more grist for that mill). Three taps yielded about a gallon and a half in the first 18 hours. Would have been more but a bucket fell off its hook and another bucket overfilled.

Poor Cupcake is shivering in the background.

Last night I took the sap to the sugar shack (ok, just our turkey fryer set up by the barn) and commenced the boil. About two hours later we had about a cup or two of good-looking syrup. When I tasted it I was blown away by how incredibly delicious it tasted.

Then, despite warnings from sap experts I consulted, I boiled it little longer and wound up with caramel-syrup-goo. It also tasted like heaven, but this weekend I will keep a better eye on viscosity and stop when it is still in the syrup stage.

This whole experiment worked out far better than I anticipated. Today we’ve got three buckets collecting sap. Tonight it is supposed to get below freezing again, which I’m told is critical to producing good sap flow the next day. So tomorrow I’ll likely have a couple of gallons of sap to boil down.