The maples sap rises threw the sap wood only with very particular conditions. Temperatures must be under freezing at night and above freezing during day time. This only happens in our region of the world (East Canada and North East of the US).
On Sunday we decided to go ahead with making maple syrup and went buy enough spouts and buckets to "milk" eight trees. Monday, I tapped the nicest trees under a cold rain, never less it was neat to see the first drips come out the spout I just placed. The trees were dripping so well that by the time I was done tapping the trees I could already collect from the first ones. Now, don't ask me what went threw my head, probably the excitement of the moment, but I decided to go get more equipment and tap more. By the end of the day I had 19 trees dripping and and a cup of maple syrup ready for enjoyment.
It is clear that evaporating the sap in the house is not a good idea as to reduce the liquid by a ratio of 40 to 1 it makes a lot of water to vaporise. For some reason I didn't like the idea of doing it outside neither, we are still heating the house and it seams inefficient to waste all that heat outdoors. I came up with an idea, I figured if I piped my pot on a chimney exhausting threw the window with an inline fan I could keep the house dry and in bonus would collect some of the heat to keep warm. Bingo! Tuesday, I tuned up my system and had a home maple syrup evaporator.
Now my biggest problem is that I'm getting more sap than I can evaporate. This consumes way more time than I expected. Collect , boil, can....run, run, run...clean, clean, clean. My kitchen is sticky, my soles are sticky, my stove is sticky, my fingers are sttttiiincky, ooops my key board is getting sticky. Well it is messy, but it is sooooo good.
