Making Maple Syrup

Each year my family makes maple syrup back on the home farm.  The early warm weather allowed for early tapping this year, but the extended heat put an early halt on the sap running from the trees.  We went home for a weekend visit and got to partake in the annual festivities.  This was Michael's first experience with maple sap collection.  Approximately 100 taps are inserted in the trees, and I believe the yield this year was 42 gallons of syrup.

Michael trotting to the maple sap bucket on the tree

He went to every pail to get a drip of sap on his finger....

...and had to taste each drip on his finger.

Bags or pails are used to collect the sap from the tree

Danielle (Andy's oldest daughter) pours the sap from the bags into a pail

Then the sap is poured through a strainer into a 500 gallon plastic tank...

...to be hauled back to the farm to be cooked down into maple syrup.  I think we brought home 230 gallons of sap that day.

This is the sap cooking (boiling) in the stainless steel pan.