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Show Page 8 The Ogden Valley news Volume XIX Issue IV May 15, 2011 Tapping the Western Bigtooth Maple “Sugarbush” for Syrup By Jeff Holt Last year I was clearing a road through some small trees in the hills southeast of the Monastery, and I cut a stand of saplings very close to the ground. Later in the summer, I made the mistake of driving across the same stump field and one of the sapling stumps tore out the sidewall of my truck’s tire. I glared at the little offender and wondered how that 1” stump could be so hard as to slash through my tire. I looked at the leaf patterns that were re-emerging and saw that it was a maple. For years, I knew there were maples ringing our fields, but they all seemed so slight and thin in diameter. I honestly hadn’t ever given them much thought. Later on last fall, I came across some on the sunny edge of one particular field and I made a mental note of how large these particular trees had grown. I thought then that these trees might produce sap for syrup. As the winter progressed, my mind kept returning to the thought, especially when coming through customs from Canada and seeing all the natural maple syrup products in the Duty Free shops. So I ordered 25 tree taps, or “spiles,” on EBAY. The spiles are aluminum, lightweight, and yet very strong. Cost was around $1.25 each. Sap from maple trees runs up and down the tree when temperatures are higher than 40 degrees during the day while still falling below freezing (32 degrees F) at night. If the ambient temperatures do not fall to below freezing at night, the sap won’t run. So I was worried about missing the season, knowing we’d already gotten too warm in the Valley. But, I was pretty confident that the temperatures were still right within that required range up on the mountain. And thank goodness for the internet! In a short couple of days I had read everything I could about tapping maple trees and producing syrup. Originally, I thought that the maples we have around the Valley were Box Elders. I had read that Box Elders were also a member of the maple family, and that they could be tapped, but that they have a very low sugar content and that a lot of sap would have to be gathered to boil down to produce any meaningful amount of syrup. A landscape architect in the Valley told me that the trees were really Bigtooth, or Canyon Maples, the predominant variety for the Western U.S. The online articles related that this Bigtooth maple is the closest relative to the Sugar Maple, prized in Vermont and the rest of the Northeast and Canada for its high sugar content. Sugar maple sap contains roughly 2.3% sugar on average, requiring 43 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of finished syrup. The mystery for me was whether our Utah Bigtooth Maple was anywhere near as sweet. Silver maples produce around 1.5% sugar content, requiring 67 gallons of sap to produce the same 1 gallon of syrup. I was worried that the Bigtooth would be worse and would end up requiring a lot of work for a little syrup. Some internet sources said the Bigtooth maple would produce similar results to the Sugar maple, but another stated that the early Mormon Pioneers had abandoned the production of sugar from local maples because the sugar concentration of the Bigtooth variety was poor and required over 150 gallons of sap to produce 1 gallon of syrup (meaning a .6% sugar content). I think it was probably just so much easier to get sugar from beets that our ancestors abandoned the practice of tapping these small maples. But no information source was definitive. Getting the sap is not the problem, but the energy cost and time to boil it down to syrup is. So, I endeavored to make the experiment with our stands of maples. I was up for the gamble and waxing for the adventure. I attempted to get up on to our land in the first week of April, but got the four-wheeler stuck in deep snow, well short of the selected spot. I planned to try again a week later and bought 15 five-gallon plastic buckets with lids (the internet encourages “food-grade plastic”). I cut holes in the lids with a Saws-All to allow the sap to drip into the buckets, while leaving most of the lid surface in place to keep out bugs, twigs, and bark. Ten days passed and I tried one more time to get up the mountain. I hauled in the buckets, lids, and a cordless drill fitted with a 7/16 bit (check your spile size for the proper drill bit). I got as far as I could on the four-wheeler and then cross-country-skied in with the gear the last mile or so. I picked out fifteen trees ranging from 10 inches to 25 inches in diameter and started to tap the trees. All but the largest tree got one tap only. I drilled into the bark about two inches deep at a slight upward angle (allowing gravity to work its magic) and then tapped the spile into the hole with a small hammer. The spile is tapered to the back with two small holes in the inside tip. The spile acts to plug the hole. The sap running through the tree moves into the hole space and gravity brings it through the two holes at the back of the spile and down the spout to drip off the lip and into the bucket. I drilled my first hole and the sap immediately ran out and down the bark in a tiny stream—a very good sign. The spiles have a hook attached under the spout and in twenty minutes I had drilled 15 trees and I had hung a bucket on each tap hook. The largest tree, commanding a great spot at the head of a field (with little competition from surrounding trees) had grown to 25 inches in diameter and so I ventured two taps in that giant, one on one side about three feet off the ground and another higher, on the opposite side of the tree. Most of the Bigtooths don’t get over 10 inches in diameter, and grow in clusters. Maple farmers in Vermont call their stands of Sugar Maples their “Sugarbush.” I was very pleased at the venture so far. But despite the initial burst of sap from the first tree, I had no real information about sap flows and resulting volumes. Each tap seemed to be dripping at a completely different speed. I had used five-gallon buckets to assure myself that the buckets would not overflow before the few days required to get back to them. (It’s that pesky day-job again!) Second, sap can go bad within a few days if the bucket is left in the sunlight. That same high sugar content makes sap an excellent medium within which to grow germs. The days were still pretty cold up there, and so I was not too worried about that, but I did worry about overwhelming the buckets. The internet data suggested that I could expect 1-2 gallons a day in sap flow, but that that would vary from tree to tree. I sat in my meetings the next couple of days calculating faucet drip rates and volumes on my calculator, wondering if I would see boom or bust when I could get back to the “bush.” Three days later (two-and-a-half to be more specific), I went back in on the four wheeler, carrying a single-element propane burner, a standard grill-sized tank of propane, a 10-gallon stainlesssteel turkey pot, a ladle, a canning funnel, a cloth filter, a radio, a camp chair, a couple of smaller buckets, a roll of paper towels, a sandwich from Subway, and some drinks from Chevron (some real high-adventure provisioning here!). More snow had melted at that elevation (around 5,700 ft.) and so I got in a little farther this time on the machine. I snowshoed in the rest of the way this time, carrying my equipment in a couple of trips to the site. The snow had all melted within the stands of trees, and only the open fields were covered 1-2 feet in very heavy snow. Checking the buckets, I was immediately surprised at the amount of sap that had been collected. Smaller trees had produced at least a gallon and averaged about 1.5 gallons. The larger trees had 3-5 gallons per bucket, but none had run over. The one large tree that I had tapped with two spiles produced nine gallons of sap in 2.5 days! In all, I had 31 gallons of sap in my buckets. I have now concluded that watching paint dry has only one serious rival; watching tree sap boil. After a couple of hours and one NBA game on the radio, I checked the progress, did some math, and decided that it was going to take a long time to boil down all this sap. I pulled out the spiles. I didn’t want the burden of any more sap. So, whether I got a pint or a gallon of syrup out of 31 gallons of sap, that was the limit for me this year. I was lucky enough to get phone and 3G internet service up there, so I returned business calls and emails for hours, and surfed the web looking for more efficient methods to evaporate water from tree sap. My clients had no idea how beautiful my “office” was that day. I learned online that my 1-foot diameter lobster-pot is five times less efficient at evaporation as the standard Vermonter’s metal pan, which averages at least 16”x32.” It’s the size of the boiling/ evaporating surface that matters. All of these more experienced maple farmers use wood fires as well, with wood cut from the very tree stands they manage. I was spending $15 per tank of propane as my heat source. The web says that the Canadians and Vermonters prefer the smoky hint that a wood-fired heat source imparts to the finished liquid. Eight hours later, I came off the mountain with a little over three gallons of condensate in a thermos. I spent two more hours on the home stove getting that down to about a quart and a half of amber liquid, not yet thick enough, and I had only boiled down 9.5 gallons of liquid! I had 21.5 gallons left up on the mountain yet to process. It would be so much easier to bring it off the mountain and do the boiling in front of my garage while I did chores around the house, but I just don’t have a 30-gallon tank on a snowmobile/amphibious craft. I consoled myself by saying that sap boils at a much lower temperature at that higher elevation anyway, but then remembered that far more propane is used at that altitude than in town. Sixes and a half-dozen. I went the next day with the intent to finish the job and took up another full tank of propane. I ran the burner full blast for eight hours and got the remaining mix down to about 6 gallons. If anyone had seen me cooking down in those woods, it would have appeared that Huntsville had acquired its own local “moonshiner.” Throughout the day (and four more NBA games), I noticed that the dry-wash behind me was now wet and as the day went on, it steadily rose to over two feet of muddy rushing water, almost ten feet across. At about 7:00 p.m., I began to wonder if the difficult stream crossing I had made at 10:00 a.m. was now going to be impossible. I wrapped up the works, left everything but the full thermoses at the site, and raced for the exit. My four-wheeler just about stalled out mid-way through the Bally Watts stream; even Bennett Creek was at an all-time high. Five more hours was spent that night boiling the sap down (be careful not to peel paint on your ceiling with so much water boiling indoors) before the syrup began to thicken. (Use spatter shields on the boiling pots or be prepared for sticky little sugar spots all over your kitchen counters.) I combined both batches and cooked down the last two gallons in a non-stick saucepan to 208 degrees Fahrenheit, a little more than 7 degrees above the boiling point in Huntsville on that day. Such required precision takes a keen eye on a candy thermometer. The light-golden syrup that resulted from all that effort is perfect, just like in Vermont or Montreal. We got 104 ounces, or ¾ of a gallon of finished syrup, evidencing a sugar content of 2.6%; which is very impressive. The effort was not at all in vain, and I am so proud of the local Bigtooth maple trees! My wife made some French toast the next morning upon which to try out the finished product. Real maple syrup is not like the store-bought variety. It is much stronger in taste. We tried it straight, and in a half-melted-butter, half-syrup mix to cut the sweetness back. Heaven . . . . We canned the rest in little eight-ounce jam jars, thirteen of them. (Simply heat the syrup to a temperature above 180 degrees Fahrenheit and fill clean jars and top with new lids.) And here’s a little note here to my friends; don’t count on any of these as gifts. It’s way too precious a commodity to part with. But I can tell you there are Bigtooth Maple trees everywhere around the Valley and in the hills surrounding the Valley with which you can make your own Ogden Valley Brand Maple Syrup. Who knew! Jeff Holt is a resident of Huntsville, and is Chairman of the Utah Transportation Commission. |
