How to Make Maple Syrup

hey guys Eric here from tactical intelligence net today what I want to show you is how you can make maple syrup and right now it's it's early much so it's late winter it's the perfect time to start tapping trees specifically if you have them in your area maple trees you can do this with birch trees as well although you're going to be balling down a lot more of the SAP to get the syrup that you need but maple syrup is perfect from obviously maple trees this tree and particularly on the other ones that I'll show you is on my property and it's called Norway maple if you have sugar maple on your property or somewhere nearby that you can use that's even better but these trees do a fine job making some great syrup so basically what you're going to need is a drill I use a cordless drill and the bit needs to be slightly smaller than the tap that's going to go into the tree these taps actually I ordered from Amazon and get them you can find kits all over the place but basically what I like to use is this one it's a really hard plastic tap and it has a tube that you just stick on the end of it and feed it right into a bucket or a two-liter bottle that I'll show you in a second as well and so once you start collecting the SAP you just start boiling it down and I'm going to go through this whole process and show you how it's all done obviously it's not going to be all done today it's going to be over a few days but you'll get the idea alright guys so when you're tapping the tree basically you want to put the whole you can put actually in a lot of places since I'm feeding it into a bucket and the hose isn't that long I'm going to have to obviously put it at a height where the hose can reach the bucket but basically when you drill the the tap hole you want to drill it on a slightly upwards angle so that the SAP runs out easier so I'll show you how that's done so I drilled in about an inch and you can already see I don't know if you can see right here but I'll zoom in a little bit but you can see that the SAP is already running out and I'm just going to put my tap in here and just take a hammer or the end of an axe like I'm doing here just tapping it then you should stop seeing it feed through here right so let me zoom in on that so you can see the SAP flowing freely out of that I'm just going to hook on the hose and feed it right into the bucket now and then just put it into a food grade bucket or some other type of container and that's it I'm just a quick note as well the tree where you're drilling you want to make sure that it's on the south-facing or the you know south southeast facing side if you can't reach directly the south facing that's obviously where the Sun is at most of the day and especially in the late winter that's where the SAP runs the most so you're going to want to tap that side of the tree I'm going to have you take a look at some of some of the other taps that I've had running now for a few days and explain a little bit of what what I've been doing there all right so here's another couple taps I get actually from this this other maple tree you can see a two lines running into one bucket this is about a four gallon bucket and it filled up this whole thing up in about a day so it really didn't take long if the SAP is really flowing fast you're going to get rapid fill so just one quick note on that the days where you have night time where it's freezing cold or below freezing and then during the day where it warms up like today where it's in the mid 40s that's where you're going to get a ton of sap flow so that's one method and also another note too if you're if you're tapping a larger tree you really only want to do one tap for tree of poor tree if it's a small tree but if it's a large tree like this you can do two and sometimes even three taps just don't put them any less than six inches of clip it close to each other and if you have some previous taps from previous years don't put the taps directly below it try to skirt them off to the side so that's pretty much it for double tap in a tree there's another method you can use if you don't have a bucket you can just feed the line directly in a 2-liter bottle these things are actually already completely filled up so what I do is just take this and start to pour it into a bigger like a five gallon bucket that I have or if I have something boiling which I do have currently which I'll take you over to see I'll just pour it right into the boiling SAP alright guys so this is my setup that I have it's basically just a propane tank this is what I use to fry my turkey Thanksgiving and obviously you want a nice clean pot we get a good rolling boil going with this SAP that's already in here and all you do is just keep adding more and more basically I'm going to start with about ten gallons that makes about a quart of maple syrup and what I look for is to get about a gallon per year so that's pretty much it now I'll just show you the process as it boils down and we get closer to actual alum syrup what to look out for all right so we're getting close to the end of the day here it's kind of a probably hard to see with the camera here but the liquid inside is actually a lot darker than obviously the clear stuff that comes out of the tree so this is a you know getting down to the syrup level I got it a little bit less than halfway down so right when it gets to about two gallons or a gallon I'll usually bring it inside to finish it off and I'll show you how that's done all right guys once uh the big pot here dwells to around the eighth of its size so that's about a gallon I'll pour it into a smaller pot and strain it through something like this like a cheesecloth it needs like a t-shirt or cotton shirt or some other Muslim better or something that will just get all the impurities out of it and then I'll just start to boil it down obviously it did you can war the whole thing in the house if you want to but you're going to get a lot of humidity in your in your home you know water is going to be everywhere over the wall the money can be a little bit sticky from the sugar so it's better just at the very last card to bring it home boil that the remainder part down so you can reach the proper temperature so basically the way that it works is that you want to take your boiling temperature and it might be different depending on your altitude for me it's since I'm at sea level boiling temperature is 212 degrees Fahrenheit and what I'll do is you want it to get just 7 degrees above that so 219 degrees Fahrenheit to 19 to 20 that's kind of a sweet spot with maple syrup again if you're at sea level if you're a little bit higher you'll want to go you know wherever that 7 degrees is so the good kind of movie to follow if you are like say in Colorado or something is to take the temperature of the boiling water outside of your boiling it or inside and just see what one temperature is and then just add 7 degrees to that so that's pretty much it so I'm going to boil this down until it reaches that temperature and it should be hopefully around a quart of maple syrup so we'll check it out a little bit so as you get to the close to the end you can start to see that it's bubbling up what you want to do is just kind of take a thing a margarine the butter just wipe it on the edges there you can see that it goes down right away they'll start to froth up again but then it's going to it just prevents it from spilling over alright so taking a closer look they take it off the heat a little bit so you can see it's got a nice amber color sort of what you want to see in syrup it's not quite boiled down to where it should be but it's getting really close at this point all right so we've worked pretty much at temperature and basically what I'll do at this point is do one last filtration and pour it right into the canning jar so I'm using a cheesecloth here again you can use a t-shirt muslin anything that will filter it but still allow it to get through and let the sit for a little bit I'll tilt it down so it doesn't look like I quite got a court we'll see how much I have afterwards but it's pretty it'll be pretty close but I get a bunch more coming so I should hopefully get a gown this year I'm hoping to get a gown before the seasons out so actually it looks like we are pretty close to a court here if not exactly at a court so basically I did about again 10 gallons of sap so usually that makes about a quart so we'll see yeah and it's looking to be pretty much exactly in coordinate now it's pretty runny you can see that that's because it's very hot as soon as it cools off it's not going to be running at all be nice and thick and perfect for pancakes waffles whatever you use syrup for all right so what you can do you can just put the lid on this and it will actually create a nice seal and close in on itself because of the heat so I'm gonna do that but I'll be using this and throwing it right in the fridge alright so I found a lid and put that on here threw that guy on now it's really hot so as it cools off its going to create a little bit of a vacuum and seal that up just just nicely so you can actually store it in room temperature and then when you open it you're going to want to put in the fridge so that's it maple syrup

Channel: TacticalIntelligence

Views: 1,247,119

Keywords: maple syrup, survival, prepper, Cooking

Id: d74a6uKAz2o

Length: 11min 27sec (687 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/bikemandan]

10 gallons.....makes one quart. My god. Must take ages to boil down and a whole lot of propane!

[u/roffz]

Holy shit, some people here are such pricks...

It was a homemade video guys - no professional cameras, crew, or script.. I thought the guy did a good job with it. He set out to make a video demonstrating, step-by-step how to make maple syrup and did just that.

At least it was not a commercial like half the other videos on here

[u/[deleted]]

Reminds me of the school trips we used to take every 2 to 3 years. It is a pretty cool experience to go to a real sugar bush where everything is hooked up and there are tubes running through the whole forest so no one has to actually go empty the buckets.

Plus at the end you get maple syrup on snow and then roll a popsicle stick around the line of syrup. If you have never done this, do it with real maple syrup.

[u/Halfawake]

Petition to rename /r/ArtisanVideos to "/r/peopledoingstuff"

There wasn't a single step in the process where he didn't slop sap or syrup all over.

[u/amastro46]

This is awesome. Great video, the dude seems pretty chill

[u/easypeasy6]

Basically and obviously = the whole video.

[u/iSeize]

if thats the whole process....what makes syrups different from others?

i just ask because i've been using the syrup from my family's farm my whole life. would another place's syrup taste exactly the same?

[u/[deleted]]

He spills so much out of his containers.

http://www.tapmytrees.com/faq.html

[u/shaggorama]

How to make Maple syrup.

1. Be a tree.
2. Make syrup.