 This is the SF Productions podcast network You get about a 1% sugar concentration So it takes you 86 gallons of that sap to make that same one gallon of finished maple syrup So definitely a lot of labor savings involved if you take the time to try and identify The sugar maples that you have and you see that just as you saw up in the lane Most of my sugar maples have white stripes on them and this is this is what you're looking for here This is a sugar maple leaf You're looking for a leaf that has three to five of these little fingers There's a little finger there there and then it has these three big ones here Mm-hmm, and then they have these little scallops on the edges of their fingers Most maple leaves have that general characteristic three to five fingers scallops on their edges The thing that you're looking for that tells you that this is a sugar maple tree is that the scallops Have very smooth edges The next thing you're gonna do is you're gonna wait until late winter of early spring Until you start to get those temperature fluctuations we were talking about and there's always what I call a teaser week So somewhere in January, maybe early February you're gonna say oh, it's it's gonna be warm for a couple of days Well wait because you always get one week where it's like warm for a couple days Then you get another two or three weeks of really bitter cold. So mm-hmm ignore the teaser week but when you see eight to ten days of that Fluctuation and temperature below above and below freezing then it's time for you to tap and When you tap a tree You're basically gonna take a drill bit and we use a standard We use a stainless steel drill bit because it's a little safe, but you can use any standard size drill bit And you're gonna place a spile in your tree and I have a bunch of different kinds of spiles They all serve the same purpose which is to get the sap out of the tree But these are just different styles that have been in use throughout Well forever in fact some of my spiles are 40 50 years old because I again I get them second hand Let's take a look at the bags first of all these are bags Why buckets versus bags? I actually used to do buckets In fact, I had 150 buckets at one point in time when I started out and then I eventually moved over the bags I Like the bags a lot because if you look at a bucket, I know the bucket over here looks a lot bigger But this bag actually holds more sap Wow, so this is a two gallon bucket, which is big For a sap bucket. This is a three gallon bag. Okay, so when this bag is full It'll actually hold three gallons of sap this bucket will overflow at two gallons So one is this holds more sap the other thing I like about this is as I'm driving through the woods here on my tractor I can't tell how much sap is in the bucket So I pretty much have to stop and look in every back bucket and that takes a long time with this as it fills up The ball of you know, you can kind of look to the woods You see that the bags are bulging a little bit You can actually see how much sap is in each one and that's kind of cool too And then the the metal part the sap sack holder that very nicely in my dishwasher So I can get 28 of these in my dishwasher at a time and a couple hours later I come back and I'm good to go for the next season. So I like the bags a lot better It's kind of nice, you know with the fog sort of Thanks, so I'm gonna take a different route than I've ever taken I'm gonna go the way that we go when we're gathering We'll go we'll go the straight route that way you guys can see more Actually from a dairy farm that used it to to Transport milk then they were steam cleaned and then I purchased them So they've only been filled with milk once then they were steamed clean and now we're using them from maple sap 275 gallons in each one of these and then once we're ready to start processing our sap We'll turn on the reverse osmosis machine, which again is new to the sugar shack this year. This is the first year We've had it The reverse osmosis machine is just like what you would use in your house if you had a water system It means the water It separates the water from the other stuff that's dissolved in it now in your house You're keeping the water the good water and you're washing the stuff away We're running exactly the opposite here. The water is being set aside and we're keeping the concentrated sap And when we're ready to boil We'll actually Yeah That's good It's actually perfect What's going on is as we boil the sap all the steam that's generated is Heating the copper which is then being transferred to the sap that's inside Usually we run right between 180 and 200 degrees for the previous we've done nothing else to it So we've got hot saps coming out From the blue pan it goes into this front pan which is called the finishing pan And that's where you really start to develop the maple syrup. It comes in over here And then you cut it just like a maze it goes up and then down and up through this Partition until it gets to here. You can see it particularly up here. It's now thicker It's getting foam and you get big bubbles you see up here in the front there's real big bubbles Then it's starting to get a little more like maple syrup and as it winds its way over to here And then over to this side You can see that those bubbles are getting smaller and thicker So we actually have syrup at about 218 This is a temperature agent for copper We always want to shut that off before we open the door. Otherwise you get this last furnace type effect and there We have a little more syrup than that We always put on our fire gloves because that door is about 300 degrees in there You see we got a nice broren fire. Just throw a couple of keys in the wood Now there's two ways to know that when you're done making maple syrup for the day Either you're just so tired you can't do it anymore Or you run out of sap and we're boiling We're boiling not processing but we're boiling about 32 gallons of sap an hour So I have approximately 100 gallons of sap in there right now. You can see this little 100 mark right there So I've got about three maybe four hours worth of sap to boil yet today. So that'll take me right through today's two ways Which is awesome. So I got just enough Our processing of sap which is turning raw sap into maple syrup with the reverse osmosis machine We can process about 62 gallons of sap per hour. So we're actually quite efficient for the size of the operation that we have Throughout the course of the normal day All get six to eight gallons of finished maple syrup