My parents were in town a couple of weekends ago with our 2008 supply of fresh Maple Syrup from the trees on our property in Western New York. Here’s a slide show of the process of making real maple syrup from the sap dripping from the trees to the bottling process.
The old-fashioned method – sap dripping from the “tap” in the tree into a pail. Now, most of our maple trees are connected via plastic “lines” or tubing that runs from the highest point down the hill creating a web of lines from tree to tree to cut out the need to unhook and empty every bucket by hand.
A better view of the old-fashioned method. (We still hang buckets like this around our house and the sugar shanty.) Sap does not flow from maple trees every day throughout the tapping season. It flows on days when a rapid warming trend in early to midmorning follows a night when the temperature has gone below freezing. Thus, the amount of sap produced varies from day to day. Normally, the average maple tree produces 10-12 gallons of sap each Spring. (That means it takes all Spring and four maple tress to make just one gallon of syrup!)
