Even in California a few intrepid souls tap the Big Leaf Maple abundant in the Sierras to boil down the sap into syrup. Yeah, it takes a lot more sap than sugar maples.

I understand a few other species of tree than maple can also be tapped and their sap reduced to syrup / sugar.

Anybody getting ready for some non-commercial sugaring?

It's hard to tap someone else's trees. They tend to not like it.

With sugar maples, it takes about ten gallons of sap to make one QUART of syrup.

There is also a fire-free method of making maple syrup, something with freezing.

Sue

I'm told that birch makes a lovely, spicy syrup. Something of a Northern delicacy.

And now I know what I'm having for breakfast!

We do it here in PA in early March, at a friend's place. Fire and kettles - only way to go.

Nice!

I was lucky once to walk alongside a horse drawn sledge through a family sugar maple grove, dump small pails into 10 gallon milk cans, and them dump all the sap into a huge sugaring "stove" in a half-underground sugar shack. Impressive. Delicious.

Wonderful! Where'd you get those great kettles? Does the wood smoke (and choice of wood used) impart any subtle flavour to the finished product?

Our family used to go to sugaring when I was a kid. The last time I sugared was when I was 34.
At the end we were tapping about 40 acres of bush with gravity feed plastic lines.
We never did use vacuum systems.
Plastic spiles and tubing let you run a lot of taps to a central collection point. Sometimes you can feed or pump the sap straight to the sugar shack.

We used an evaporator pan instead of kettles. It was about 10 feet long and three feet wide. It cooked enough water off that you could pull thin syrup continously from the low end and finish evaporating it in a smaller finishing pan.

You will want spiles, an auger and buckets if you just want to tap a few trees. Metal spiles are pretty much antiques now. I have seen a few at auctions cheap.
Plastic ones are actually nicer to use.

You figure the number of spiles in a tree by how thick the trunk is at chest height.
A tree a foot thick gets one tap, a foot and a half tree gets two, and two foot diameter and above gets three or four taps.
Most of the spiles are made of plastic now. If you had to you could make them out of plastic, wood or metal pipe.
Usually you drill about a 3/8 or 1/2 inch diameter hole about 2and1/2 inches into the tree. The diameter of the hole depends on the size of the spile.
Only drive the spile in enough to seal (and support the pail), driving spiles too hard makes them likely to leak.
It also insreases the damage to the tree.
Spiles need to be vented at the top. The old drip spiles were naturally vented but some of the newer ones meant for plastic vacuum line systems are sealed.
You only tap a tree every other year, that gives it a chance to recover.
You should expect about 30 gallons of sap from each tap for the time the sap is running. But it might be as low as 10 gallons or as high as fifty.

Sap needs to be strained before boiling it, and filtered after boiling. You will get some crystals of minerals out of the sap as you get to syrup temperature. It is called sugar sand and it might be harmless, but who wants gritty syrup. Note that sugar sand is not sugar, it is other minerals from the sap.

I mentioned syrup temperature. This is just like making candy.
As you evaporate the water the boiling temperature goes up. You can evaporate at lower temperature than boiling but then you have a hard time measuring how strong the syrup is.
You are looking for a temperature 7F above water's boiling point for syrup.
If you go farther than that you start to get taffy and fudge followed by hard sugar. Soft sugar is about 32F above water boiling, hard maple sugar comes at about 42F above the boiling point of water.
Note that I did not say degrees above 212F because water boils at different temperatures depending on the air pressure. This varies both with altitude and local weather systems. You need to check your thermometer in boiling water everyday you are evaporating sap and work from that measurement.

You need to be careful not to burn your sap.
If you burn the sap by trying to boil too fast the bottom of the sap in the pans caramelizes and the sap becomes dark looking and tastes more like caramel than maple.
That is why I keep saying the idea is to evaporate the sap instead of boiling it away.
#1 maple syrup should be light amber like clover honey.
So heat gently, a nice simmer.

One other thing is the sap becomes worse as the season progresses and by the time the buds are starting to break the sap is too buddy to use as syrup. It get a strange flavour, starts to go ropey in the pails and tastes bad.
One of my favourite things as a kid was drinking the sap straight from the tree.
It does take about 40 to one from sap to syrup, but that is on average.
If you have real sweet trees it might be as good as 30 to 1, or if they are not sweet as poor as 50 to 1.

Birch has a lot thinner sap. When we tried boiling it ran about 80 to 1 and nobody liked the flavour much.


Ps. boil down the sap every day or refrigerate it. If you let it sit around it will go rotten and that is no good at all.


Here is a short manual about sugaring as a backyard hobby from the Ontario govt in PDF if anybody wants it.
http://www.lrconline.com/Extension_Notes_English/pdf/bckyd.pdf

Nice post, scafool. Thanks!

Agreed, very interesting. I appreciate the detail. The things you learn around here...!