Making Maple Syrup Part 3: Evaporating (Feb 2011)

It takes 30 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of pure maple syrup. The extra 29 gallons is simply water that must be boiled off quickly in order to keep up with all the sap flowing from the trees. In this video we demonstrate a basic evaporator that we use to evaporate the sap coming from our 50 taps.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Evaporating
• maple sap
• maple syrup
• tapping
• sugar maples

[laniamore]

Love your videos. Where did you get your stainless steel bin?

[goatkisses]

@laniamore We bought it through Anderson's Maple Syrup and their website AndersonsMapleSyrup Thanks for watching and commenting :)

[jacobman1521]

actually it's about 40 to 1

[goatkisses]

@jacobman1521 True, a tree that gives 30:1 is a rare one and it typically ends up being closer to 40:1, although each species of tree will give a different ratio. I just purchased a sap hygrometer to measure the sugar content of the raw sap and I'm finding it does vary quite a bit from tree to tree.

[jbjbuild]

Great videos! Could you do a video that goes into more detail about how you made the cinder block evaperator, specifically the transition to the stack.

Thanks, and again I love your videos!

[goatkisses]

@killerwolf568 Thanks for watching and commenting. The fire is a pretty hot fire and doesn't make much smoke, but you are right, the steam sure is a lot (when we first made maple syrup in our house the first year, the steam made my walls condense, that was no fun). I don't consider it pollution, since it's just water, but others might.

[jacobman1521]

@goatkisses Ya some of the trees I tap are along a brook so there is a higher water content. I have some up on the hill away from the water and the sugar content is much higher. The average tree is about 2% sugar.