If you’ve never done it before, you might be wondering if it’s hard to make maple syrup. This article will discuss the difficulty of making maple syrup and whether or not it’s worth it for your family.
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When you sit down to Saturday breakfast and pour out that smooth, beautiful, and delicious maple syrup, you might wonder: Is making maple syrup something I could do myself? Is it hard to make maple syrup?
Generally speaking about the idea itself, it is not hard to make maple syrup. However, with that being said it is important that it is made clear that making maple syrup is still a very time and energy consuming process, and in some cases, even labor intensive. Though the idea of evaporating water out of the sap to leave the sugar behind is a fairly simple concept, the entire process of making maple syrup is going to take time, resources, energy, and patience.
Below, we’ll discuss the process of making maple syrup and why some might even say it is hard to make maple syrup.
Table of Contents
- Maple Syrup Season is Short
- Expect 40 gallons of sap to 1 gallon of syrup (at least!)
- Evaporating the water takes a long time
- Finishing syrup can be tricky
- Collecting sap can be labor intensive
- Is it worth it?
- Are you ready to start making your own maple syrup?
- Make sure you share this post!
- More on Maple Syrup…
Maple Syrup Season is Short
One of the main reasons why some people might find it hard to make maple syrup is that you have to spend a lot of time working on making maple syrup once the trees start “running”. Maple syrup season is very short, most of the time only one month or so. During that month, you can expect to be spending a lot of time working with trees and sap! You’ll need to tap the trees, hang the collecting device, actually collect the sap, cook down the sap to a condensed sugar level, then bottle and preserve the finished syrup all within a month’s time period. Some days you might be overwhelmed with sap, other days you’re waiting and wishing for more.
With such a short season, you can expect to dedicate a lot of time and energy into to the process of sugaring so that you can get the most out of the season as possible.
Expect 40 gallons of sap to 1 gallon of syrup (at least!)
That’s right. It takes a lot of sap to make syrup! Because of the vast amount of sap it takes just to make a small amount of syrup, some people may say it’s hard to make maple syrup. If you want to make enough maple syrup for your family for the entire year, you’ll need to collect enough sap to do so.
The average person consumes 2.9 ounces of maple syrup per year. For a family of four, that is equivalent to about 12 ounces of syrup, or about one and a half cups. One and a half cups of syrup will take 3.75 gallons of sap to make.
Now to me, this number seems pretty low. Our family can consume almost a quart of maple syrup every other week, though I do use it for baking (like in my blueberry muffins) and almost every morning for breakfast (like over our sourdough pancakes). If we ended up with only 1 1/2 cups of maple syrup, we would be extremely and utterly depressed.
You’ll need to find the average amount of maple syrup your family consumes and base your need off of that. If you’re even considering making your own maple syrup, odds are you probably are consuming quite a bit more than the 2.9 ounce average. Know that it will take some time to collect all of the sap you need and complete the long process of turning it into maple syrup.
Evaporating the water takes a long time
Others might say it is hard to make maple syrup because of the amount of time it takes to actually evaporate enough water out to change sap into syrup. In our experience, it takes us around 14-16 hours to evaporate the water out of 40 gallons of sap to make maple syrup. Within these 14-16 hours, we are cooking the sap continuously over a fire without taking any breaks. Of course, this time can vary depending on weather, sugar content, and your heat source. Regardless of all external factors, you can expect to be cooking sap for a long time before it becomes syrup!
Finishing syrup can be tricky
Even with those with lots of experience, the process of finishing syrup can be tricky. To the naked eye, even syrup that is finished and ready is hard to identify. I have a whole post on finishing maple syrup because messing it up can mean losing out on lots of hours of work! Be sure you are ready and know all of the tricks to successfully finishing your maple syrup so that you won’t lose any of your precious maple syrup.
Collecting sap can be labor intensive
Especially in the early season when there is still snow on the ground, collecting sap can be labor intensive. If you do it the “old-fashioned way” with buckets or bags, you’re going to need to carry the sap from the tree to your collection container or evaporator pan, sometimes in knee deep snow! Bags can hold up to 5 gallons of sap, and buckets can hold the same- weighing in at around 42 pounds! Be ready to get in a good workout when it comes to collecting sap, sometimes multiple times per day. This physical part of the process can make it hard to make maple syrup for those who may have health issues.
There are alternatives to buckets and bags, of course that can make collecting sap a lot easier. Maple syrup can be collected with a vacuum through tubing lines. By using a vacuum and tubing, the labor intensity of collecting is reduced drastically. However, there still are downfalls to this method, too. Tubing and vacuum will require a generator unless you’re completely gravity-fed. Squirrels can cause havoc to tubing, springing leaks. With everything there are positives and negatives; you really just will need to consider which is best for you and your family.
Is it worth it?
Cost
For our family, making maple syrup is absolutely worth it. We use so much of it at our house as a natural sweetener that we’ve simply become dependent on it! Making maple syrup has become a necessary and important part of our homestead food stock. Just last year, we went through 7 gallons of maple syrup (and it wasn’t enough to last us to the next sugaring season!). If we had purchased that in the store, where the average cost is $31.00 per gallon, we would have spent $217 on maple syrup alone!
Connection to the Land
Though it takes time, effort, and maybe even a little elbow grease, we are absolutely certain that it is worth it to make maple syrup for our family. In addition to saving our family some money each year, we also feel really good about knowing exactly where our syrup comes from. There’s something special about going through all of the work of harvesting something that really makes you grateful and appreciative for what the Earth has to offer. When you simply purchase from the store you can lose that connection. We really are proud to eat a product that was harvested from trees near our home.
Not only is the connection to the Earth a wonderful part of making maple syrup, but the process itself has something beautiful to offer. Spring can be messy, sometimes chilly, cloudy, and rather uninviting at times. The fact that you have to go collect sap forces you outside on days when you might not have chosen to go out on your own. I don’t know about you, but I almost always feel better after being outside. If we were sitting in the house on spring evenings instead of at the hardwood hill collecting sap, think of all of the memories that we would have missed out on! Just the other day, we all stopped our work to watch as the geese flew over and landed in the pond below the hill. The children play in the puddles and on the tree stumps. We get to notice the early grasses starting in the rich soil beneath the leaves. It’s all part of bringing a connectedness to the Earth that you just cannot get without doing it yourself.
Are you ready to start making your own maple syrup?
If you’re with us and feel like it’s not too hard to make maple syrup, you can learn all about how to get started here. If you’ve been making maple syrup for a while, then let us know that in the comments below. What keeps you going?
We wish you all a happy maple syrup season!
Make sure you share this post!
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