Sap to Syrup: A February Tradition in the Cold North

A sugar maple, tapped. Photo by author.

Every February there are certain traditions and routines which come to flower. It’s Black History Month. A Pennsylvanian whistlepig is wrenched forth from its comfortable slumber to forecast the weather and remind folks how long it’s been since they’ve watched one of the greatest and most profound films ever made. Cars go on sale so that we may celebrate our nation’s presidents, even though some of them – yes, Mr. Wilson, I’m not talking solely about you – were objectively horrible human beings. People gather together on a Sunday evening to eat appetizers and watch a series of creative and entertaining commercials interrupted with dogged persistence by a football game staged by a monopoly born of corruption which views its fans as the goose which will forever lay golden eggs.

But here in New Hampshire, and other states along America’s cold north – as well as our northern neighbor, known to apologize for everything and anything except her policy of allowing and encouraging the homeless or depressed, or anyone else for that matter, to commit suicide on the public dime – a deeper, timeless impulse takes hold and folks go out with a drill and a little equipment, easily and inexpensively acquired from the local hardware store and stowed away in basements and garages for just this purpose, and tap maple trees.

On a crisp morning with warmth in the offing, a hole is drilled into the tree at a slight upward angle so that gravity will allow the sap to run into a spile – a metal bit that is inserted into the hole and which guides the sap into a bucket. In the old days the bucket would be metal with a flap over the top to discourage unwanted visitors, mostly insects, from sampling and then drowning in the collecting sap. The tin eventually came to be replaced with plastic and in recent decades many, we O’Nolans included, have abandoned the hanging bucket approach altogether and have adopted plastic tubing running from the spile to a sealed bucket at the foot of the tree.

This tree is wide enough to handle more than one tap.

Just because humans have been tapping maple trees for thousands of years doesn’t mean innovation is impossible, even for such a simple process.

How exactly the sap runs is not completely understood, but Man long ago worked out the essential aspects. While, in theory, just about any variety of maple tree can be tapped, the aptly named sugar maple is, by far, the preferred tree.

There’s something – I think it goes back to our ancient hunter-gatherer roots – that I find compulsive about picking berries. Blueberries, strawberries, apples, it doesn’t matter. Once I start picking there’s always one more tree or bush I could get a few more fruit from. It’s the same thing with tapping maple trees. I’ve got three taps going, why not a fourth? This tree was a poor producer last year, but two or three years ago it was great; why not give it another shot?

Does this way lie madness? Perhaps, but it also leads to some damn fine maple syrup.

Folks often find themselves, having tapped their own stand of maples to its limit, collecting from neighbors’ trees, neighbors who have figured out that they can get a few jars of the good stuff, simply by letting someone else do the work of making it. Others, like some friends of ours, end up fabricating their own wood-fired evaporator.

Reminder: This all takes place over a period of only a few weeks.

The narrow window for sugaring opens up in February, when overnight freezing temperatures and relatively warm days cause the trees to act as a sort of pump, forcing water up through the roots and into the trees. So much water, in fact, that sugar maples will often be seen to weep, excess sap flowing naturally through the bark and running down the trunk. The greater the temperature difference between night and day, the greater the flow will be.

As this water flows through the tree it collects sugars and other compounds; the flavor of maple sap is not that dissimilar from water. But once sufficient water has been evaporated, any unwelcome visitors have been filtered out and some Maillard reactions, those that cause sugars to brown in delicious foods – from syrup to a well-seared steak – have occurred, delicious maple syrup is your reward.

There’s quite a bit of evaporation which has to happen first as a very, very large volume of sap is required to make syrup, a forty-to-one ratio, in fact. This means that five gallons of sap will yield two cups of finished syrup. Evaporating sap has a warm, woody vanilla-like aroma.

A hotel pan of sap over an outdoor burner. Photo by author.

Furthermore, as the sap gets into the final stages of becoming syrup, its temperature can change quickly and unpredictably, requiring close attention. Once the magic temperature of 219℉ is reached, you have maple syrup.

Commercially, there are four grades of maple syrup available, from the lightest, Golden, to Amber, Dark and Very Dark, each more intensely maple-flavored than the last. How the color develops is complex, but a good rule of thumb is that the warmed the air temperature outside of the tree, the darker the syrup is likely to be, due to more active microbial activity at those temperatures and thus an increase in the amount of the sap’s sucrose which is converted into glucose and fructose.

Like I said, it’s complicated.

These complexities, however, make producing your own maple syrup that much more satisfying: You are capturing natural dynamics of your own back yard in a particular February, concentrating and preserving them. What you’ve made is of your own space, subtly different from your friend up the hill or on the other side of the mountain.

And since you’ve gone down the rabbit hole of home syrup production, you’ve almost certainly made more than you could possibly use. Can it, store it, give it as an end-of-school-year gift to your favorite teacher. Properly stored, the stuff will last for years.

Not only do you have a snapshot of your place over the course of a few weeks in February to keep for yourself, why, you can share it with others.

They’ll thank you for it, too.