Discovering - Maple Syrup with Dr. Phil

welcome to discovering it's sugar making season here in the upper peninsula and i'm up in copper harbor we're making maple syrup with dr phil there's an internal pressure inside the tree that's looking for this the quickest path out and we just made it for him we're just here to help so sit back and relax it's monday night and it's time for discovering [Music] the secret streams that flow beneath the cliffs of colored stone thick and healthy with virgin pine and oak surrounded by the greatest lakes this world has ever known the black bear's awesome presence as he roams the hills and fields call of the timberwolf the looms lonesome trill the eagle soaring high above the trout lies deep and still these are what i treasure the only way i measure the feelings that i have for this fine land there is so much to discover when you're a longtime lover of a northern michigan [Music] so i tell my grandkids it takes 40 drops to make one drop of maple syrup use it sparingly [Music] i'm getting ready for the first for the first flow usually the first flow is can be the sweetest so you don't you really don't want to miss that first flow [Music] i have a quota because this is a one-man show i have a quota of just making five gallons and that's taking out a couple hundred gallons on snowshoes of sap and that's plenty of work for me [Music] so i'm probably the furthest furthest north maple syrup maker in michigan and uh our problem is the snow is so deep um this this year we are we're 100 inches less than we were last year so it takes a little bit longer for the trees to thaw here both the temperatures the daytime temperature and the evening temperature if they're both below zero the sap won't run if both temperatures are above zero the sap won't run it's almost it's the equivalent of a light switch if we don't have the variation between freezing and warm the sap won't run at all so we watch for that there's a two tail signs that we use that tell that the trees are ready one of them is what you see right there that's called pullback and the old-timers used to say when the snow pulled back from the base of the trees that would mean that the tree was thawed and it was ready to produce sap the other one is sepsicles when you see stepsicles hanging from the tree you know the sap has moved up and back in the old days the kids used to break the maple branches on the way to school and then on the way home they'd have stepsicles these trees here that we're tapping all the trees here they're on the south side of the road so you really want to have the most southern exposure to the trees you don't want to be down in a valley you want to be as high as you can and you want to get as much southern exposure in the wintertime so you can get more sun to the trees to heat them up to crop create that temperature fluctuation so these trees that are right close to the road get this the sun first so they're going to thaw first they're going to produce first they start i started with 10 trees and it's almost infectious you know i started with 10 and then i did 20 then i did 30. now i do 50 and that's about all one man can do on snowshoes at least this man there's some round bark so this was several years ago where it tapped and then we move over and up and you can see the round bark here and then progressively as we move over and up that's each year that it's been tapped so they they heal by themselves when you tap a maple tree you actually stain the wood so that's why we want to move over and up so it's kind of a pointed appointed elliptical stain sitting right here and it can go several inches in both directions so i want to come over and up so i have a nice clear sap wood which is going to be white and then we want to drill it on an upward angle because we want we don't want the sap to freeze in there overnight and you'll see the white wood coming out so you know you're right in the sap wood it's also very important that you don't want to come in and out too many times you do want to bring the the sawdust out but you don't want to wobble your drill bit on the inside because if your tap is not in there tight all the maple syrup will run down the trunk so you tap about um somewhere between two and two and a half inches in to get you know you're in the sap wood all my drill bits have a piece of black tape on it so i know exactly when to stop so all of the the tap holes are the same depth they have to be about 10 inches in diameter 10 to 12 inches to tap them and here comes the first drip so the trees are ready i laughed that's pretty exciting to me you know you know you're tapping at the right time i smile there's there's an internal pressure inside the tree that's looking for this the quickest path out and we just made it for them we're just here to help [Music] it's very really nice when you have a really nice sap flow and you can stand here on the road and you can actually hear all of the taps dripping it almost sounds like a symphony i mean it's just a beautiful beautiful [Music] sound [Music] the early stamp is the sweetest to change the ratings of it they used to call it grade a fancy and it's very very light colored syrup it's not my favorite syrup i like the syrup at the end of the year the maple syrup will come out darker so you'll get into the amber color and that's a very nice very strong maple flavor now we're going to go see we're going to go see yogi and boo boo these are two brothers they're maple trees that's what i call them yogi and booboo this is yogi and his brother booboo and they're very good producing maple trees if you look at this one you can see the deep the deep grooves and this is a very very mature maple tree this is like a little more than a teenager and so the younger trees are usually more vibrant produce more sap but yogi here keeps trying to keep up with this young one so you know you've done this too long when you start naming the trees he'll have a nice sound this one oh my goodness let's catch him that's a good drip a drip a second that's a good that's a good drip the other thing you look for is the canopy and if it's if it has a lot of space between all the other trees and it has a lot of canopy where it can capture the sun and do more photosynthesis you'll get a lot more production out of it and when you look at this one it has a lot of side branches so that's really good [Music] it's better to collect your sap every day because you don't want it to freeze overnight because then you end up with big chunks of ice [Applause] sap has to be taken care of just like it was milk it spoils just that fast so if you're if you take it off and you put it in pails like i do and you leave it in the sun and it gets warm you're going to get bacterial growth and then you won't have any sap worth using you know they say theoretically you should boil it within seven days but if you pack it in snow like i do it's just like putting it in a freezer or a refrigerator sometimes i'll collect three days in a row and won't have enough to boil and then when i get to that 45th gallon of sap i'll go ahead and boil that was free that knowledge right there i gave you know i should be charging for this [Music] okay [Music] that's beautiful sap oh boo boo's almost full oh that's just beautiful [Music] [Music] and yogi's almost full [Music] [Music] so what we're going to do now is we're going to use a hydrometer and we're going to check we're going to look at the sugar content of the sap i'd say the sugar content is about 2.4 the last batch that i took out was 1.8 so let's see about this one that is that 2.4 so the higher the sugar content the more syrup is going to produce so the average is 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup so if the sugar content is higher instead of making one gallon of syrup i may be able to make one gallon and a quart [Music] this boiler holds 30 gallons but it's always better to start and just keep it about two inches because the the main thing you want to do is keep the ma the maple sap boiling as much as you can because the whole point of doing this is to get the maximum amount of evaporation it takes about six hours so the whole point is to keep your fire really hot and keep the sap boiling where you'll be out here for god knows how long i pretty much use all pretty much all maple and oak because you you want you know the hottest coals you can get and so what we want to do is we want to make sure everything that we do from this point forward we take as much foreign particles out of the sap as we're boiling it as we can and i begin to get all of the bark and little particles that may have come off the tree maybe in a windstorm and if you were to taste it it tastes a little tiny bit sweet i'm going to begin to preheat some of the sap back here by the chimney so once that gets warm we're going to drizzle the sap into the pan like i said we want to keep the the maple syrup boiling so if i pour in a large amount of cold sap i'll lose the boil then i've got to sit stoke the fire get the rolling boil back up so if i can preheat the sap and then just drizzle it in so it's kind of like as it evaporates out i keep putting more in and i don't lose the boil it's amazing how crystal clear the sap is when it comes out of the tree and how we reduce it down so much that it turns the like liquid gold into maple syrup it's a it's just a fascinating process you can see that it creates a lot of foam in in the sap as it's boiling and a lot of that is minerals that was in the sap so again the more the more of the foreign material we can take out the clearer the maple syrup will be when we're done so we want to take as much of that foam off foam is blocking the evaporation so the more more foam we can get off the more that steam can get out this is some of the trade secrets right here you know every year you do what you get a little bit better you figure out new ways to do it [Music] it's very important that i don't let the sap get down too far because if i scorch it then the whole batch is over with and then i just have to throw it all out so this is my scientific scale to determine when to take it off so when the sap is down to the bottom hole right here i know it's time to take it off so it's not too scientific so i do this and it's just above that hole now and the other thing you watch for is when the bubbles get real small just like they are we're getting pretty close and then i take what i call pre-syrup off off the fire and i put it in a stainless steel container and i take it into the camp and then i finish it and take it from pre-syrup which is about three gallons from the 45 and then it'll i'll boil it down again in a more controlled environment and get down to one gallon of maple syrup hopefully [Music] the boiling point of water is 212 degrees and so syrup theoretically is produced seven degrees above boiling water so at about 219 degrees i'll start paying closer attention it depends on the barometric pressure outside what the boiling point of water is which then affects the boiling for the maple syrups this is going very fast so when i took it off last night i must have had it down to maybe two gallons because the sugar content is really high because the temperature is elevating pretty quick today so now we have a lot of foam and we can take a little bit of butter we put a little butter in here and you'll watch the foam will just disappear that way it kind of helps so you don't boil over which is quite a mess it doesn't affect the maple syrup it basically boils off so now we're at 219 degrees and in theory that should be maple syrup so what we're going to do is we're going to use the hydrometer and we're going to measure basically the density [Music] and so we want it to come up to this red line but you can see it's sinking so it's not syrup yet so we're going to leave it on there for a little bit longer 66.7 that's the percentage of sugar that's in the maple syrup so that's an industry standard is 66.7 if it's too high it'll become too thick and then we start moving into the candy if it's lower than 66.7 then it's going to be very runny and thin so that's why we use the hydrometer and it has the mark on here this red mark that tells me this is basically 66 66.7 this is 221 degrees still not quite there i'm going to say we have maple syrup remember every drop that we see going in there was 40 drops sap out of the tree so every little drop we want that's a beautiful color so now we're going to put it back over here and we're going to take it up to 187 degrees so we can bottle it [Music] you know it's a lot of hard work making the maple syrup but when you see it going into the bottles like this and you have a beautiful amber color and you've been able to take mother nature's bounty and turn it into liquid gold it's it's a pretty nice experience to say the least [Music] well that's it for this week thanks for watching and i hope to see you next week right here on upper michigan's very own [Music] discovering

Channel: 906 Outdoors

Views: 5,445

Keywords: discovering, 906, outdoors, yooper, up, u.p., upper, peninsula, mi, michigan, maple, syrup, spring

Id: 8CCSz2Yr_6c

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021