Essential Maple Syrup Making Supplies

This list of maple syrup making supplies are the essentials that you’ll actually need for your small batch maple syrup operation.

Bags hung on maple trees as an essential maple syrup making supply

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You’ve decided that you’d like to make maple syrup this year, but you’re not sure what maple syrup making supplies you’ll need. In this post, I’ll talk about the supplies that you will actually use for small batch maple syrup making, helping you to get started with essentials and nothing extra and fancy!

Let’s dive into the supplies you’ll need for maple syrup making.

1. Drill and Bit
2. Taps and Hammer
3. Buckets or Bags
4. Container to hold Sap
5. Evaporator Pan
6. Place to Cook Sap
7. Filters
8. Hydrometer
9. Jars and Lids
10. Firewood
Other Suggestions?
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1. Drill and Bit

The first thing you’ll need is to be able to make a hole in your tree to get out the maple sap. Back in the old days, people would have used hand drills to make the holes in the trees. I’m sure you can imagine the time and labor that went into tapping 40-50 trees! Today, people most often use a cordless power drill to make the holes in the tree, drilling in at an upward angle using a 7/16″ sized bit for buckets or a 5/16″ bit, which is also used for bags and tubing. This helps to get the job of tapping multiple trees done relatively quickly and easily.

2. Taps and Hammer

Some of the first most essential maple syrup making supplies you will need are taps. There are a couple of different tap options available depending on the method you’re going to use to collect your sap. If you’re using buckets, you’ll want to make sure to get a tap with a hook to hang the bucket on. These types of taps allow the sap to flow easily from the tree at a downward angle and into your bucket easily.

For bags, you’ll want to choose a smaller tap. We’ve actually tried to use the larger bucket taps for our bags and found that because they’re so much longer, the sap would miss the bag and often drip out onto the ground. We use taps like these for our bags, which as you can tell are shorter, smaller, and do not have the hook for the buckets.

The final type of tap you might consider is an enclosed tap which are often used with tubing lines. These are completely covered, so the sap drips directly from the tree into the enclosed tap, then to the tube, and finally to the container. These types of taps do a nice job of keeping the sap clean.

Of course, after you have the taps, you’ll need a hammer to drive the taps into the tree securely.

3. Buckets or Bags

Honestly, you can be really creative when it comes to what you’ll collect your sap in. Traditionally, many people use pails or bags with bag holders to collect sap from the tree. There are a lot of other unique (and cheap) ways to collect sap, too! We’ve collected with ice cream pails before, and I have a friend who uses milk jugs. Whatever you can find that’s big enough to collect the sap and can hang from your hook is going to work, but having something to hold the sap is essential for maple syrup making.

4. Container to hold Sap

Another essential maple syrup making item will be a large container to hold your sap. Unless you plan to cook the sap down each day your buckets or bags fill up, you are going to need a spot to store the sap between cooking. In the beginning, we used a clean and new trash barrel to store our sap and that worked well! As we started tapping more trees though, we needed something bigger. We were able to find a water storage tank used and now use that to store our sap between our cooking time. If you’re able to cook often and have a big enough evaporator pan, you may be able to get away without needing a container to hold your sap, however, even a small operation is going to probably find that they need a storage container relatively quickly.

5. Evaporator Pan

One of the most important and essential tools for maple syrup making is an evaporator pan. In the beginning of our maple syrup journey, we borrowed a neighbor’s evaporator pan to make our maple syrup. After we decided that we wanted to make maple syrup each year, we invested in a large evaporator pan of our own.

When looking at evaporator pans, be sure to invest in one that will hold enough sap (check the gallon capacity) and is also wide and shallow. This will help the sap to cook off the water more quickly, giving you syrup faster. We have an evaporator pan like this one that also has valves to let the syrup out after it’s cooked down, which is a really helpful feature. Just be sure to clean it out really well with warm water afterwards so that it doesn’t get clogged.

6. Place to Cook Sap

Another thing that is essential to maple syrup making is a place to cook down your sap. When we first started, we made a place to cook down our sap using cement blocks to hold up our pan, then built a fire underneath. Today, we’ve cut out a part of an oil barrel to put our evaporator pan, build the fire within the barrel, and use that as a place to cook our sap.

If you don’t have a place to build a fire or you would prefer to use gas, you can also use something like an outdoor propane cooker with detachable legs to place your evaporator pan on top of.

7. Filters

To keep your maple syrup clean and appetizing, you will need filters. Some people choose to filter their sap before cooking it down, especially if you use open pails that might collect bits of bark and bugs. Usually with bags and tubing the sap is going to end up being pretty clean before the cook-down process and filtering it beforehand isn’t necessary.

Once the syrup is cooked, though, you will need to filter it. Filtering it will help remove any remaining particles or dirt, and can also help to reduce sugar sand, or niter, that may appear at the bottom of your maple syrup jar.

8. Hydrometer

Another essential maple syrup making supply is a hydrometer. A hydrometer is absolutely crucial to finishing your maple syrup and knowing when it is done. Even for the very experienced maple syrup makers, it can still be hard to tell just by looking at the sap when it is done. Buying a hydrometer is a great way to know exactly when to pull the sap off the fire and make sure a whole batch isn’t lost. A hydrometer simply measures the sugar content within the sap, letting you know when enough water has evaporated out of the sap to call it syrup.

9. Jars and Lids

After your syrup has been finished, you’ll need a place to keep your maple syrup until you’re ready to use it. We can our maple syrup in quart jars, but they do sell a variety of different maple syrup bottles that you may consider for your maple syrup storage.

If sealed correctly, your maple syrup should last for many years. However, if mold does arise on your maple syrup, you can oftentimes still use it. You can read more about what to do if you find mold on your maple syrup here.

10. Firewood

Unless you are choosing to use gas to cook down your maple syrup (which can get rather expensive after a while!), another essential maple syrup making supply is firewood. You are going to go through a lot of firewood keeping the fire during the long process of evaporating the water from the sap. Be sure to have a nice stockpile of wood ready at the beginning of maple syrup season.

Other Suggestions?

These are my top essential maple syrup making supplies! Of course, there are a lot of other tools that people use for making maple syrup, too. If you have something you think should be on the list, let me know in the comments!