Aunt Jemima's maple syrup envy. Vol #3 - The soggy mountain boys start burnin' sap!

Soggy mountain boys today...

...and soggy mountain boys in days of yore.

My brother (top photo, right) and I taking a photo op break while burning sap into maple syrup. Watch the video below - it'll explain all the details so I don't have to repeat them here. Let me just say this process is laborious and tedious and time-consuming and the result is very little maple syrup. Which is why it's so expensive. But the time spent with my brother is priceless.



Here's a 2nd video - just watch the beginning to see the color grades of the sap as it thickens. The rest of the video repeats what I went on about in the 1st vid. You'll want to click on READ MORE! to see more pictures of the still - I mean, the evaporator that my brother constructed to burn the 150 gallons of sap we collected. It's a pretty impressive set-up.

NEXT POST: Vol #4 - "Gimme that old time radio".

The evaporator - without the pans on top.

You can see where the fire is built. The boiling pan stretches from the back of the chimney to the front of the evaporator in order to create a draft and speed up the heating process. Me must've burned 2 1/2 full trees throughout the weekend.

You need to boil sap 7 degrees above boiling temperature before you can draw it off (drain the syrup into a bucket). As the sap is boiling and water is evaporating (leaving the sugar), the syrup bubbles and foams and you don't want it to boil over. That's where the bacon comes in. Just dip that in the syrup and the fat alters the consistency of the boiling syrup just enough to bring the bubbles down. And you can eat the bacon later.

Little has changed in making maple syrup. Check out this dude in 1912.

And my brother in 2010.