Coming out of the Adirondacks and living close to Vermont, Maple Syrup was a northern staple.
Like Santa Claus, if you were a good person all year long someone would give you a jug or two.
Sapping is very labor intensive. Perhaps not as much as it use to be. But there are associated cost to the easier path.
When I was young, we would tap trees with a Brace and Bit. Later came the gas powered drills, faster and easier, but way more costly.
After the taps were set, we would hang pails off them and let them run. Collecting sap was a chore in itself, usually done with a tractor, a wagon and a huge vat/tank on the wagon. One of the elders would drive to each tree or as close as they could get, and we would empty the pails into the tank. Some would be overflowing, others would be near empty.
Pipelines changed all that. But then you had to gravity feed back to your sap arch, or have a tank positioned high enough off the ground to drain it into a portable tank to haul back to the arch.
Then there was the whole boiling process, it meant cutting and seasoning a lot of wood, and I mean a lot of wood!
It takes roughly 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, sometimes more, sometimes less.
It is also a very weather dependent industry, no overnight frost meant no morning runs of sap. Too early, no sap, too late, no sap. Winds blow the wrong way, no sap.
Then when #2 fuel oil was hovering around $.90 cents a gallon. Everyone was pushing for the removal of the wood fired systems and adding an oil burner. This was a double edged sword. You could be up and boiling in no time, and just shut it down and leave. But at $3.50 a gallons it got expensive. Especially with a 17 gallons an hour nozzle feeding the whole thing.
Then there is the human factor. Boiling Sap naturally lends itself to drinking, don’t ask me how I know. Let a finishing pan cook off dry, and scorch it, and you are looking at $1000.00s of Dollars to replace it.
I always enjoyed making syrup, but it was definitely a chore. Some of the best breakfasts I ever had were eggs poached in the syrup.
They should have left it primitive. Personally, I think the stench of fuel oil ruins the aesthetic of the process.
I am not a fan of pipelines, oil or the vacuum hose setups, let what worked for hundreds of years be.
Much like pressing cider which we also did, now everything has to be pasteurized, filtered and strained. We used layers of old burlap feed sacks. To contain the solids.
Just squeeze the apples and drink! Don’t worry about the worms.
LV.
