Making Maple Syrup for Beginners

Just a handful of years ago, I could not have told you how maple syrup is made step by step, or explained where maple syrup comes from. But then we bought 2 acres and here we are! We began tapping our own maple trees on our property 3 years ago. Don’t get me wrong – we don’t live out in the country. We aren’t farmers. Our family is what you’d call urban homesteaders.

We live in the city, 10 minutes away from Starbucks and Target. But we have a little property that we love to utilize. We want our kids to know how to do stuff and to see where their food comes from.

My husband hunts and we’ve even butchered deer together as a family (I’ll spare you the photos!). I have an organic garden and we love to harvest and cook as much as we can from that garden produce.

We have chickens for free range eggs…and…we make maple syrup. It’s starts with nothing but a tree and it turns into the most delicious liquid that we use for months to come! It’s a family team building exercise and it actually gives us something we use all year to remind us of our effort!

Find out how to go from maple sap to syrup – start to finish with me!

Maple Syrup Collecting to Harvesting:

There are many steps in the process of maple sap to syrup. I wrote stand alone posts that cover the 4 biggest steps, but I realized I had never really put the full process together all in one place. So here you go! Maple sap to syrup in 6 easy steps!

Step 1 – Identifying the trees

You can tap many kinds of trees to make syrup, but the ones that give you the most sap for the least amount of work are sugar maples. They are kind of hard to identify in the winter once the leaves have fallen. So set a reminder in your calendar to go out in the early fall and mark your trees.

You can just tie a string around them if you’d like. That way when it’s time to do the tapping, you’ll know which trees to tap.

Step 2 – Tapping the trees

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The next step in the process of maple sap to syrup is tapping the trees to collect the maple sap. I wrote an in depth blog post about this process. In it, I go over how to tap the trees and collect the sap. I also give links to the spiles and tubes we use, and give ideas on how to gather collection buckets in the most frugal way.

It even has a video that allows you to see the process of my son tapping the trees for the people that really love to see it done. He’s really smart, so he explains a lot of the process too!

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE POST ABOUT TAPPING TREES

Step 3 – Building a maple syrup evaporator

Once you’ve collected your syrup, you need a way to boil it down. You cannot boil sap inside your house because for every gallon of syrup you end up with, you boil off 39 gallons of water. Can you imagine having 39 gallons of water floating around inside your house? People who have tried that have had their paint peel, wallpaper begin to come off, and mold form in their rooms!

So you’ll need to do this outside. There are many ways to boil it down, but since we have access to lots of wood, our preference is building a maple syrup evaporator in our backyard that can be broken down when we are done with it. This summer, we set up the evaporator on the side of our house and we are using it as an extra compost bin! Double duty!

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE POST ABOUT BUILDING A MAPLE SYRUP EVAPORATOR

Step 4 – Boiling sap

You boil and boil and boil sap. We often have 30 or 40 gallons of sap to boil down, so we spend all day stoking the fire and refilling the pans. I wrote another in depth post about how to boiling sap and how to recognize when it’s time to move to the next step!

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE POST ABOUT BOILING SAP

Step 5 – Finishing maple syrup on the stovetop

We’re almost done turning maple sap to syrup! Once you’ve boiled down the sap outside until it’s almost done, it’s time to bring it inside to finish it off on the stovetop. Because I boiled down sap multiple times this year, I just stored my almost completed sap in the freezer. Then the next time I did it, I just added them together and was able to do this final process at the same time.

If you’re canning your maple syrup, you’ll need to have all those things ready before you get this on the stovetop to finish off. But once all those things are ready to go, you can dive in to this final step!

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE POST ABOUT FINISHING MAPLE SAP ON THE STOVE

Step 6 – Maple syrup storage

Once you finish the maple syrup on the stovetop, you need to figure out how you’ll be storing your precious liquid. There are a few methods of maple syrup storage. Maple syrup cannot just be set in a pantry and used like the pancake syrup you get from the store – unless it’s properly canned. But even then, once it’s opened it needs to be refrigerated.

When I first started using maple syrup, I used to buy it by the gallon in Amish Country. One day I grabbed my partly used gallon from the pantry storage and put it on our pancakes and thought I would die! If you’ve ever tasted mold, you know what this tasted like. It was the sweetest mold you’ve ever tasted! Yuck!

What was even worse was that there was most of the gallon still remaining and I had to throw it out. It was devastating! But, I did learn my lesson! Store maple syrup properly!

If you just have a small amount, you can certainly just store it in the refrigerator. But if you make quite a bit of it like we do, you’ll need another option. So what are some other kinds of maple syrup storage?

Can you can maple syrup?

Absolutely! This is what I normally do because it allows the maple syrup to be stored at room temperature. It’s not hard, but there is a process to follow to make sure that the maple syrup will not go bad before you’re able to use it.

The great thing about canning it is that you don’t need to use up any refrigerator or freezer space. Plus, when you’re ready to use it, it’s already at room temperature. It’s a little more work on the front end, but super easy when you go to use it.

In the last post about finishing maple syrup on the stovetop, I gave pretty comprehensive instructions on how to do it.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE POST THAT EXPLAINS HOW TO CAN MAPLE SYRUP

Can you freeze maple syrup?

YES!!! I wondered the same thing so this year I tried it out! I made sure to leave head room in the mason jar in order to allow for expansion. Because almost all the water was boiled out of this, mine didn’t expand a ton.

The really cool thing is that it never completely froze! It was almost the texture of a maple syrup slushy! I found that it worked really well and I would definitely do it if I didn’t want to take the time to actually can the syrup.

How long does maple syrup last?

If you store it in the refrigerator, maple syrup will last about a year. If it’s canned properly in a mason jar, it can last for many years! Honestly, ours has never gone past a year because we eat it so fast. But I’ve read that it can last from 4 years to indefinitely! You can store it in the deep freeze indefinitely as well. I try to use things in my freezer within about 2-3 years because more than that just creeps me out!

So that’s the process of going from map sap to syrup. I hope it inspired you to jump in and try it out yourself. I think you will absolutely love the process, and more importantly, the reward!

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Finishing maple syrup is the final thing that needs to be done to complete the maple sugaring process. Maple syrup season is so fun and so rewarding! I love to teach my children where food comes from, and this a great way to do that. No matter how much syrup you make – whether you make a ton, or just a single gallon of syrup, I’ll walk you through the whole process.

Over the last few posts, I’ve covered all the basics of maple sugaring – from collecting gallons of sap from maple trees, to building a maple syrup evaporator, to turning that maple sap into syrup. Well…almost! We are to the last step in the process which is finishing maple syrup on the stovetop!

Quick overview

Tapping maple trees

In this post, I gave all the steps for tapping your maple trees to provide the sap you’ll need to make gallons of syrup. You can get a lot of sap from just one tree! I gave all the links on where to purchase the inexpensive equipment needed to do this late winter or early spring project.

It explained where to find collection buckets, what to use to clean containers, what size drill bit to use to make the tap hole, what time of year to tap your sugar maples, how much sap you can expect to get from a tree, whether to use metal taps or plastic, how much sap you’ll need to make a gallon of syrup, and how to store all that cold sap. It’s pretty comprehensive!

Building an evaporator

In order to make your own maple syrup, you have to find a way to put the sap through a boiling process to evaporate off the water and leave you with the sweet syrup. Once you’ve filled up all your sap buckets and stored them in a cool place, you need a way to cook it down – and it should NOT be in your house! This post explained all the details on how to build a diy maple syrup evaporator for your own backyard.

I covered how to build a cinder block evaporator with an open fire beneath it in a few simple steps. It explains how to create what is essentially a wood stove with cinder blocks that will heat the bottom of the pan to cook down the sap. I show what to use as an evaporator pan for boiling sap so that you have the most surface area exposed for evaporation. I even showed how we started the first year, and how we expanded the second time we made maple syrup. Now that we are 3 years in, we have a bit of a system!

The boiling process

Next, I walked through the boiling process that turns all that cold sap into the final product – a gallon of maple syrup! I go over each step in the process in this post. While it takes a long time to boil it down, you will be so glad you did it!

So, after all that sap hauling, and wood chopping, and evaporator building, and boiling, you don’t want to mess it up at the final boil! The great news is that if you have a big stock pot, and you have a little bit of patience as you stick close to the hot syrup while it comes to a boil, you’ll be just fine! The finished syrup will be WELL worth the effort!

Finishing maple syrup

Making real maple syrup is not for the faint of heart. It does take a lot of work, but the finishing process for your homemade maple syrup is the best part because it’s the time period where all your hard work pays off, or everything goes very wrong. Fortunately, I’ve never burned my syrup yet. BUT I’m completely committed to staying right by it the whole time so no catastrophe overtakes it! I’d recommend the same for you.

This post contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.

Supplies you’ll need for finishing maple syrup:

Stock Pot

Set with jar lifter, magnetic lid lifter, and canning funnel

Mason jars and lids – I have quart jars here but I also really like pint jars or jelly jars.

Candy Thermometer or digital thermometer

Ladle

Here’s what came in my canning set. There’s a jar lifter, a magnetic lid lifter, and a canning funnel. I have used these over and over and over in my canning endeavors and it was so worth the money!

The jar lifter has silicone on it that allows you to grab jars out of boiling water without having them slip and slide all over. The silicone gives you a firm grip and lets you hold the jar and tilt it upside down so that you can pour the boiling water out of it safely.

The magnetic lid lifter is just a little plastic stick with a magnet in the end. It gives you the ability to grab the lids and rings out of the simmering water without hurting yourself.

Calibrating your thermometer:

Since the temperature is really important, I usually calibrate my thermometer to make sure it’s correct. At our elevation, the boiling temperature of water is 212 degrees. So I just pop the thermometer into my jar water since I need to bring that to a boil anyway. Once it boils, I make sure it’s at 212 degrees.

My particular candy thermometer is actually able to slide up and down within the metal housing, so it’s especially important for me to slide it to the correct temperature when the water boils. Once it’s calibrated, I’m ready to get started!

As a side note, some people buy a maple thermometer that is specific to the temperatures for maple sugaring. I didn’t find this to be necessary for us! We’ve made gallons and gallons of maple syrup with just an inexpensive candy thermometer.

Finishing maple syrup on the stove top:

To get started, you’ll want to add water and canning jars to the canning pot and bring the water to a boil. Add the lids and rings to a smaller pot and cover with water. Bring these to a simmer, but do not boil the water. Once the jars are boiling and the lids are simmering, you’re ready to start heating the syrup!

To get started, put the boiled down sap into a stainless steel stock pot and begin to heat it. Once you start, you won’t want to leave it alone, so make sure you’re ready to attend to it for a while. I normally start this on high and let it get boiling. If it seems like it’s going too fast, you can always back it down to medium or medium high because you don’t want to give it too much heat.

Finishing maple syrup on the stovetop:

1. Put maple syrup in a large pot that has plenty of room for the syrup to expand.
2. Place candy thermometer in syrup and turn heat to high.
3. After the maple syrup begins to boil, keep a very close eye on it!
4. Syrup will start foaming and climb the sides of the pot.
5. Once the syrup reaches 7 degrees above your boiling point for water (at our elevation, that’s 219), turn off the heat and can or freeze your maple syrup!

How long will it take to finish maple syrup?

It all depends! Usually ours takes forever…like at least a half hour to an hour! But this pot pictured below only took 5 minutes! It totally depends on how far you cooked it down outside on the fire. I think I normally am really cautious and would rather bring it in early because I’m terrified to burn it outside! But I have to say that it was super nice to have such a quick process in finishing the maple syrup this time.

Getting to a good rolling boil:

The goal of syrup is to get it to 219 degrees. Technically, we need to get it to 7 degrees higher than the boiling point of water. At our elevation, that works out to 219 degrees. I’ve found that once it’s boiling, you need to wait for it to climb up the side of the pan as it gets closer and closer to the finishing temperature.

Climbing the pan:

Once it starts climbing the pan, you’re almost there! I like this pot because I can see in relation to the rivets on the side how high the syrup has risen. At this point I checked and the temp was around 215 but it vaulted up to 219 SO fast!!

Final stage – 219 degrees

This was 219 degrees — actually I think it went higher than that. Make sure not to give it too much heat. It moved SO quickly that I couldn’t turn it off fast enough! At this point it’s ready to can.

How to store syrups:

1. Canning Maple Syrup:

Simply grab a jar out of the boiling water and dump the boiling water back into the pot. Use the funnel and ladle to fill the jar with syrup. Dip the corner of a clean towel into the boiling jar water. Dip a corner of a clean towel into the boiling water and use that to wipe the rim of the mason jar to make sure that no drops of syrup are on it. Then use the magnetic lid lifter to get the lid and ring out of the simmering water and gently twist on to mason jar.

I usually cover my jars with a towel and wait to hear the “click” sound that lets me know it sealed. If any of the jars do not vacuum seal, simply store them in the refrigerator and use immediately.

How to can maple syrup:

1. Place canning jars in canning pot and cover with water.
2. Bring jars to a boil.
3. Meanwhile add lids and rings to a saucepan and cover with water.
4. Bring rings and lids to a simmer. Do not boil.
5. Once the jars and boiling and the lids are simmering, start finishing the maple syrup.
6. After the syrup is at the proper temperature, lift a mason jar out of the boiling pan and dump the water back into the pot.
7. With a funnel and a ladle, fill the jar with maple syrup.
8. Take a clean kitchen towel and dip the corner into the boiling water.
9. Wipe the rim of the mason jar to make sure no syrup is on the edge.
10. Using a magnetic lid lifter, lift the lid and ring out of the simmering water and gently twist onto jar.
11. Cover jars with a towel and wait to hear the “click” that it has sealed.
12. If any of the jars did not seal, store in the refrigerator and use immediately.

2. Can I freeze maple syrup?

Yes! I had this same question because I was super tired and did not want to wait and complete all the extra steps needed in order to can the syrup. Fortunately, I found that you absolutely can freeze maple syrup. I found that I didn’t need to leave much head room for expansion. Additionally, when I defrosted the syrup, it was very slushy since the high sugar content doesn’t allow it to freeze solid. It was so easy!

How to freeze maple syrup:

1. Gather clean mason jars, lids and rings.
2. After maple syrup is finished on the stove top, use a funnel to pour the syrup into the jars.
3. Make sure to leave a little head room in the jar for expansion.
4. Gently screw on rings and lids.
5. Allow jars to cool in the refrigerator overnight.
6. The following day, pop into the freezer.
7. Pull the jars out of the freezer as needed and allow to defrost

Does it matter what size jar I store the maple syrup in?

Nope! I tend to like to have a quart of maple syrup on hand for our family. But if that’s too much, you can store it in pint jars. Half pint jars are great for gifting and people love them! Any size will work! I’ve even saved glass bottles and used those if I’m using the syrup right away, or freezing it.

Crystals in the bottom of your jar?

While this has never happened to me, I have heard that sugar sand can develop in the maple syrup. We strain ours through cheesecloth before finishing on the stove, but I have heard that many people filter it a second time when they are pouring it into the cans or jars to bottle.

We haven’t done that simply because we haven’t had an issue with the sugar sand. However, if this is a concern for you, the way to prevent it is to just filter it through cheesecloth a second time after it has come to 219 degrees Fahrenheit to do a final filtering.

Does finishing maple syrup have to be done right away?

Good question! The first time I made syrup, I did it the same day we boiled it down. Last year, however, I didn’t have the time to do that. Plus I knew we were going to be doing a couple more boils before the end of the season.

What I did was to put the bucket of almost finished syrup in my deep freeze for a couple of weeks until we did another boil down day. Once we boiled the next amount down, I pulled this out of the freezer and added them together and began finishing maple syrup all at once. It definitely helped to not have to do this finishing process and canning twice!

How does this work if I’m finishing many gallons of maple syrup?

I think if you’ve got a larger operation, you may need to look into other ways to do this. We just tap the trees on our property, so the most syrup we end up with has been 3 gallons, and that has been over the course of the whole maple syrup season.

I think that’s it! That’s my comprehensive guide on how to finish maple syrup on the stovetop, how to can it and how to freeze it. I really hope you try this at home because it’s so rewarding! If you do, let me know how it went in the comments below!

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Boiling maple sap is the very last phase of maple sugaring. Have you tried it yet? When my brother in law visited our new home for the first time, he mentioned that we had a bunch of maple trees. He recommended tapping them and I was amazed that we might be able to make our own delicious syrup!

It took a couple years for me to work up the nerve to do it. Once I did, I was amazed! Such a simple and inexpensive thing has yielded rewards for our family for the last 3 years. It has also given us the BEST times together. It was a great success and I’m so glad we did it!

Tapping trees and boiling maple sap takes a long time. However, a little bit of patience yields a yummy reward! There’s nothing like tasting a bit of that hot syrup and realizing that all your effort paid off! Here we will break down the 10 simple steps for boiling down maple syrup in your own backyard.

10 Simple Steps for Boiling Maple Sap

(If you want to go to one comprehensive post that links to each stage of the process, find that here)

1. Collect sap
2. Build backyard evaporator
3. Chop wood to feed the fire
4. Build a fire in the evaporator
5. Fill 4″ deep steam table pans with sap
6. Refill pans and stoke fire every 20 min or so the first few hours
7. Move stoking and refilling to every 15 min after most of the sap is in the pans
8. Keep a close eye on it once all the sap is in the pans
9. As the pans boil down to about halfway full, move sap out of one pan and pour it into others and replace with water
10. When the syrup is dark and makes tight bubbles, bring inside to finish off in the kitchen

This post contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.

1. Collect Sap to begin boiling maple sap

The first step in the process of making your own maple syrup is identifying sugar maple trees and gathering the watery sap over a flow period of a couple of weeks in late winter and early spring. I delve more into all of this in a blog post I wrote about collecting sap. I even talk about the amount of sugar in sap and how that affects your finished syrup.

It covers everything you need to know the first year you tap trees and gives links for the next step in the process. It even lets you know what type of sap production you can expect and what trees to tap, like whether or not you can tap a silver maple, a red maple, or a black maple.

Collecting sap can either be done at your own home or a friend or family member’s property. One thing you’ll need to take into account is that when the sap is running hard, you’ll need to empty those buckets often and store them in a cool place until you can boil it down – so make sure your trees are easily accessible!

2. Build a diy backyard evaporator for boiling maple sap

The next step in the process of maple sugaring is boiling it down. Since you cannot do it indoors, you need to have a plan on how to do that outside. You’ll need a heat source and an evaporator pan with a large surface area.

It takes a lot of sap to make maple syrup – about 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup! That means the average amount of water that is evaporated from one gallon of syrup is 39 gallons! That’s a ton of water! If you did this inside your home, you could end up having issues with mold by releasing that much moisture into your air. You could even peel the paint off your walls!

However, there are many ways to boil maple sap outdoors. Lots of people use turkey friers to boil them down, but that does use quite a bit of propane. I chose to build a cinderblock evaporator because we have access to a lot of wood on our property, so that is a great source of free fuel.

I wrote a whole blog post about building a backyard evaporator that details how to use cinder blocks to create an outdoor oven. You simply build a wood fire underneath the stainless steel syrup pans and that open fire boils down the watery sap into delicious maple syrup. It’s the most inexpensive and portable little sugar shack!

3. Chop wood to feed the fire

This part is actually fun and a great workout! Whether you’re getting wood from someone else, or from your own backyard, you’ll need to chop it up so that the logs are small enough to catch quickly and burn hot. We usually cut the logs into chunks about 3-5″ wide and 15-20″ long.

If you’ve never split wood before, here’s a great video that shows you how to do it! We use a splitting maul like this one. It’s such a great way to get a workout and get all your pent up frustration out 🙂

4. Build a fire in the evaporator

The next thing you need to do is to build a fire inside the evaporator. Normally my husband or older son do this. But for our final boil of the season this year, they were both at work. My 12 year old and I started the fire and although it took a while to get going, we had a blazing hot fire after just a little while!

If you haven’t done it a lot, you can click this link to learn how to build a fire. I promise, it’s a great skill to have!

5. Fill pans with maple sap and begin the boiling process

After the fire is hot, I place the 4″ deep steam pans on top and fill them with sap. When we boil down, we usually have 25-45 gallons. I pour enough sap in to fill up those 3 pans, and this normally takes about 8 gallons. We keep a metal strainer nearby so we can pour the sap through that and get out anything larger that is in it like bits of dirt or a blade of grass, etc.

Once the pans are full, it will take some time to get them to a rolling boil. They go through a process of starting to gather tiny bubbles and a little foam on top and steaming. If you keep a hot fire, it will start to boil the sap. From here on out, you’ll want to keep the fire stoked and the pans full. This process normally takes us 8-12 hours depending on the amount of sap we have. We like to stay on top of it so it doesn’t slow down the process.

6. Refill pans and stoke fire every 20 minutes or so for the first few hours

I tend to set a timer for 20 minutes every time I come in from checking the sap. My husband isn’t that precise, but my ADD brain needs reminders! Once the timer goes off, I go out and see if the fire needs to be stoked. You will get the hang of it over time, but you don’t want to get it too screaming hot because it will make the sap foam up and boil over the pans. That’s bad!

So I see if it needs more logs and then I see how full the pans are. I like to keep mine very full so I don’t accidentally boil it down too far. At this point, you’ll also see if there is foam on top of the pans. If there is, you can use your mesh strainer to skim the foam off. We normally hit it against the side of the evaporator to get all the foam out of the strainer. (see video for a demonstration of what this looks like)

Side note…

In the photos I’m going to show, we could not get the fire close enough to the front of the evaporator. As I looked back at the photos from last year, I realized that this year we built the front part of the evaporator inside the structure so it slayed flush against the front. In previous years, we built it outside the evaporator which allowed us to make fire all the way up to the front pan. Because of this, the fire was a little further back and only heated the front pan instead of boiling it, which didn’t cause much evaporation from that one.

Because of that, we used the front one to heat the sap. Then we refilled the back two pans from that warm sap. We only refilled the front pan from the cold sap buckets. This is not what we have done in the past. Usually we just refill all the pans from our cold sap bucket. But because of the way our fire was heating this year, we used the method of warming the sap in the front pan and refilling from there.

7. Move restocking and refilling to every 15 min after most of the sap is in the pans

When the color of the sap begins to turn to a more amber color and it seems to be foaming more, I move my stoking the fire and refilling the pans to every 15 min. I just like to keep a closer eye on it as it gets nearer to the end because I have more to lose if something goes wrong!

Over time you’ll get a hang of how full to fill the pans. It really depends on how raging your fire is. Also, as the sap boils down more and gets a higher sugar content, it tends to foam up more. So I always keep the pans a little less full as the sap boils down more in order to keep it from boiling over once it gets to a really rolling boil.

8. Keep a close eye on it once all the sap is in the pans

Once all the sap is in the pans and your buckets are empty, you’ll want to keep an even closer eye on it. You’ll see the sap get darker as the sugar in it caramelizes and the water boils off of it.

We had a friend who forgot about it at this point and ended up burning about 2 gallons of syrup. That is devastating after all that work! So stay close by and keep an eye on it to make sure the fire stays hot, but not hot enough to make that liquid gold boil over!

As a side note, I had to leave for an appointment and was gone for a few hours, so I missed the stage between the picture above and the picture below. It looked pretty much the same as the one above but darker brown 🙂

9. As the pans boil down to about halfway full, begin to move maple sap out of one pan and pour it into others and replace with water

I start to combine my syrup once the pans get down to about halfway full. I start with the front pan and pour it evenly between the other two. Then we put water in that front pan and put it back in place. The water keeps the pan from getting damaged by being empty over a hot fire.

In previous years, we’ve then combined the other two pans when they got to about halfway. This year, however, we decided that we wanted to have more surface area evaporating water because we were tired 🙂 So we kept both of them on the fire and just watched them VERY closely.

The reason you’d keep combining them into one is that there’s less of a chance to burn it if there’s more sap and syrup in one pan. The more it’s spread out, the more opportunity there is for you to get distracted and burn that precious liquid.

10. When the maple syrup is dark and makes tight bubbles, bring inside to finish off in the kitchen

Once the maple syrup is dark, you’ll see the bubbles begin to change. You see in the pictures that the bubbles tend to clump together in groups and make tight, smaller bubbles. This tells you that the water content has drastically decreased and the syrup density has increased.

At this point, it’s a good idea to ladle it out of the evaporator pan and run it through cheesecloth to strain any debris out of it. Oftentimes there will be sugar sand at the bottom of the pan. You don’t want that in your syrup! So strain it out.

You are SO close to getting your pure maple syrup! In this blog post, we talked about boiling maple sap to take 40 gallons of sap and making a gallon of maple syrup. But after this step, you’ll need to finish the maple syrup on the stovetop inside.

The final stages in the process of making maple syrup are detailed and can be the make it or break it step! You’ll need to put the syrup in a large pot on your stove and watch closely, using a candy thermometer or digital thermometer to make sure it hits the proper temperature. Find detailed directions on how to get to finished syrup in this blog post.

Many times I don’t finish it off in the kitchen right away. I will put the pot into the fridge and complete the next day. I’ve even put it into our deep freezer to store it until the next time we boil down sap that season so that I can finish them all off at once.

Homemade maple syrup is such a treat! Whether you have small batches and end of with just a quart of maple syrup, or gallons and gallons, I think you’ll love it! Try it next year! When you look at those glass bottles full of sweet, sticky syrup with an intense maple flavor, I think you’ll agree that it’s the best thing to do when you’re waiting for spring to arrive!

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What is a Maple Sap Evaporator?

A maple sap evaporator is a specialized equipment used in the production of maple syrup. It usually consists of a large flat pan designed to efficiently evaporate water from maple sap, leaving behind the sweet treat we know as pure maple syrup.

The process involves heating maple sap to its boiling point and keeping it there over a long time. As it is boiling the gallons of sap, the water evaporates and the sugar content increases. When the sap level goes down, more maple sap is poured in until all the sap that has been collected is in the reservoir pan.

Once the liquid reaches a specific temperature, it’s tested to see if it has the correct sugar content. Then it’s bottled and that’s what we know as maple syrup!

What type of evaporators can you buy?

If you don’t want to make a maple sap evaporator, there are lots of varieties you can buy. The Smoky Lake continuous flow evaporator is the top dog in the industry. If you want to have a maple sugaring business, you might want to spend $6,500 on one. I don’t 🙂

Then you take a step down and while ones like this are expensive, they are super efficient and designed for maximum performance if you want to make a lot of maple syrup. It has a stainless welded preheater pan to bring the new sap to temperature slowly. There’s an airtight cast iron door to be super efficient with your wood burning. It’s amazing, but it’s also over $1500 and way out of my price range, as I am a hobbyist maple syrup producer.

Another option for a backyard sugar maker is Vermont Evaporator Company’s Sapling Evaporator variety. It’s a steel barrel design with two flat sections. One is a warming pan for new sap. The other is a maple syrup evaporator pan with a big surface area for evaporating out as much water as possible. It has an iron door that keeps the wood fire burning efficiently. This sapling unit is super cool, but still $1500. Ouch

Why would you make your own backyard maple sap evaporator?

I love to try new things, but I certainly didn’t need an ideal evaporator with a huge price tag. I knew I didn’t want to take my sap somewhere – I wanted to do it in my own backyard. But, I didn’t want to have to store one of those huge maple syrup evaporators when it wasn’t in use.

I needed something that could to contain the open fire (which was what we finally decided to be the best of the heat sources we could choose from). It also had to have a flat pan evaporator for the maple sap that was big enough to create a large surface area. That helped to evaporate and condense down the sap into hot syrup. I also wanted an exhaust stack to try to keep the smoke out of the syrup. Lastly it had to be portable and be able to be out of the way when it wasn’t in use.

This is what I came up with to help with our syrup production. It evolved over the years, so I thought I’d show our 1st year of use and our 2nd year and beyond.

Maple Sap Steam Evaporator Year 1:

When we began to make maple syrup the first year, we felt like we were spending a lot of money. The taps, cinderblocks, and stack pipe added up. Even though we found great prices on things, I still didn’t want to spend any more than I had to. So we didn’t want to spend more money on the stainless steel pans like you’d use in a buffet line.

Did we regret trying to save money last year?

In the end I don’t think I regretted it, but it definitely made for a unique, smokey flavored maple syrup! Honestly I cried a little the first time I tasted it. I wasn’t expecting that smokiness, but in the end I kind of loved it!

We put old oven grates on the top and built the evaporator to fit the specifications of the grates. That sounds fancy, but really we just laid the first row of cinderblocks down and then made sure the grates fit securely on them. After that, we began to build up the sides. Here’s what our maple sap evaporator looked like the first time around.

We tried to choose a flat pan to put on top of the grate that had a very large surface area in order to allow for the most evaporation. So we gathered whatever kind of boiling pan we could and went to work cooking down the raw sap. Remember, you’re boiling off 39 gallons of water for every gallon of syrup, so you need to evaporate so much water from the maple sap!

It’s a good idea to have a small stainless syrup pan with handles to help you pour it. We used a cast iron pan, a large flat pan from a friend, and another single pan that we found at Salvation Army. It wasn’t high quality, but it did the job the first year and we were so glad we did it!

Maple Sap Steam Evaporator Year 2:

Last year, I bit the bullet and bought 4″ deep full size steam stainless steel pans. I found them on sale for about $15 each, so it was inexpensive to add them. The stainless steel pans made a HUGE difference in our syrup operation this year!

The biggest difference by adding the evaporator pan was that the entire surface area of the oven was completely covered. Unlike last year when the smoke came through the grate, this time it just came out the stack pipe. After feeding the fire, we closed up the feeding hole. This way, every bit of smoke escaped through the stove pipe, completely removing the smokey flavor from the maple syrup. The syrup this year was unbelievable!!

Supplies to build Maple Sap Evaporator:

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Pans:

(3) Full Size 4″ Steam Stainless Steel Pan – you’ll use these as the evaporator pans to give you as much surface area as possible to allow for the fastest evaporation of all those gallons of sap. If you’re not up for that investment yet, you can use anything as a maple syrup pan on top of a grate or rack. Just make sure the bottom of the pan is flat and shallow to provide the surface area you need for evaporation.

Evaporator supplies:

Cinder Blocks (about 25) – some people think you need heat-resistant materials like fire bricks to make this. While these concrete blocks won’t last forever, they handle the high temperature well and this much heat doesn’t break them down quickly. For us it was the perfect thing to use.

6″ Duct Pipe – I use this for our exhaust stack. It allows the smoke to be redirected away from the syrup and it makes a perfect smoke stack!

90 degree Pipe Elbow to make a bend in the smoke stack.

Wire to Attach stack pipe

Extra bricks or blocks to cover opening

Extras:

You’ll also want to have a big stock pot to use for the finished syrup inside the house. I give good instructions here on how to finish the maple syrup inside. Those final stages are probably the most important because all your hard work is for nothing if it gets burned at the end!

Some people also use firing gloves to feed the wood into the hobby evaporator. I don’t, but they would probably be a good idea!

As much wood as possible! You’ll need it to feed the fire.

We also use 4 gallon buckets to collect as much sap as we can!

How to build a maple sap evaporator:

This is not a huge engineering feat to build a maple sap evaporator and it really doesn’t even have any sort of plans. This is the way we do the process.

1st –

The first step is to try to find really level ground. If you’re even off an inch from side to side, you’re going to have boiling maple sap that is not evenly distributed in the pans. Once you find a fairly level spot, lay your cinder blocks in a U shape that is the width of the pans. Set your pan on top of them to make sure the lip of the pan fits snugly inside the U shape with no extra room.

Now, level that first row of cinderblocks before you begin to build it up. We keep some thin stones from our waterfall feature to help us in the leveling process. Once that bottom row is fully level, you can begin building!

2nd –

The next step is to place the second row of concrete blocks on top of the first. Do you remember when you built with Lego and you had to overlap the bricks so the seams didn’t match up to make the walls of your house strong? You have to do the same thing here. We did purchase some single cinder blocks, as well as doubles so we could do the jigsaw puzzle and see what worked.

3rd –

Make the second row level before you top it off with the last row. Now add the last row. This is where you’ll place your chimney. I usually try to use a single cement block on this row so I can turn it sideways and make an open hole to place the 90 degree elbow and pipe through. Once I get to this level, I place the empty pans inside to make sure I have a nice tight fit. If it’s even an inch or two too big, the full pans can fall into the fire below and waste all your hard work. So just fit them in snugly and they will be great!

4th –

Attach the stove pipe on to the cement block with wire. We’ve done it by just attaching it to the cement blocks the first time around. The second year, my husband found some pieces of metal around our garage that had holes in them where he threaded the wire. This is not necessary if you loop it around the pipe and secure it well to the cement blocks.

5th –

Create a way to stop the heat from getting out by placing blocks or bricks by the opening. We just kept heat pads nearby. Then we use them to move the hot bricks each time we needed to feed the fire. That way the opening was blocked off and kept all that heat inside.

6th –

And there you have it. A complete evaporator consisting of a place to burn wood, a chimney, and evaporator pans! Now that you’ve got your final product, stock up on logs and get ready to go! I’ll go over the boiling down method in another post! Check it out here!

We made a YouTube video showing the step by step process as we built this in Feb 2022 for our 3rd year of maple sugaring! Watch it here!

Once you have some screaming hot coals, you can even take your hot dog forks out and make dinner over the fire. Or you can do what we did and roast marshmallows over the fire. What a sweet treat!

How to store the Maple Sap Evaporator:

We break our evaporator down and pile the cement blocks up on the unseen side of our house, or inside our garage. The 90 degree elbow, the pipe, and the wire are stored all together with it, so it’s ready to go next year!

We wash the steam pans, scrub them with a brush with stiff bristles, and store those down in our basement with all our food safe collection buckets and taps and tubing. Even though we wash all those before we put them away, we wash everything again before we set it all up just to make sure it doesn’t have any bacteria in it.

Does this ruin the grass?

Yup. Having a fireplace in the middle of your grass definitely kills an entire rectangular spot in the grass. We just raked all the ash out of it and immediately planted grass and it was great by the summer. Of course, we didn’t do it in our main area, but we did want to make sure it was super close to the house so we could go in and out throughout the day as we worked.

So if you want to become a back yard producer of syrup, I hope you try this!! It’s a very economical way to build a great evaporator if you’re a hobbyist maple syrup producer like us. While it takes a long time to go from maple sap to maple syrup, with this maple syrup evaporator, it makes a lot of work SO enjoyable!

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When we bought our house on two acres 5 years ago, my brother in law came to visit and started pointing out all the sugar maple trees on our property. He encouraged us to tap maple trees and make our own maple syrup, but I kept dragging my feet year after year.

Two years ago, I decided to pull the trigger and buy what I needed make our own maple syrup. I could just kick myself that we didn’t start sooner! It’s such a fun activity that brings our whole family together every year and we all love the fruits of our labor.

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Am I able to tap my maple trees?

Production of maple syrup only takes place in a few locations. In order to be able to collect sap from sugar maple trees, there has to be a wide swing in temperature from above freezing during the day to below freezing at night. Usually this only takes place in Canada, the Northeast and the Upper Midwest. If you live in one of those areas, you should absolutely try!

What supplies do I need to tap maple trees for syrup?

You actually don’t need much to get the process started! You’ll need the correct types of trees – preferably sugar maple trees, a drill and a drill bit that is a tiny bit smaller than the taps – in my case, that’s 7/16″. You’ll need taps (spiles), and a mallet to pound them in. Lastly, you’ll need tubing and food safe buckets to collect the sap. You’ll need additional things to cook it down, but I’ll cover that in a future post.

I purchased my supplies to tap maple trees – maple spiles and tubing on Amazon. I chose a 10 pack that included 3 foot tubes so I could run them to buckets on the ground. We already had a cordless drill, drill bit and mallet. The last thing I needed to find was something to use for a sap bucket. I ended up contacting bakeries in our town and buying used buckets and lids from them for about $1 each. I bought a few food grade containers from a nearby bakery to use as a sap collection container and then I found the best option to be our local Giant Eagle – their bakery gave them to me for free!

Some people even use milk jugs or water jugs to collect sap. Just make sure you check them often because on a warm day, they will fill up fast!

Supplies Needed:

Spile and tubing

Cordless Drill

7/16″ Drill bit

Mallet

Food Safe Buckets with Lids for sap buckets

Can I tap any maple tree?

The short answer is yes! Any maple tree will give you a lot of sap that you can cook down into pure maple syrup. The reason that sugar maple trees are the most common variety used is because they contain a much higher percentage of sugar in their sap. That means for every gallon of sap the sugar maple produces, you’ll get more of the finished product – maple syrup – than you would from another variety of maple.

With that being said, many people tap all kinds of maple trees – black maple trees, red maple trees, silver maples! While I’ve never done it, there are also other varieties of trees that can be tapped. Here’s a pretty comprehensive list of trees and some details about the type of syrup they make.

*UPDATE*

I came back to update this post in 2024 because I tapped our silver maple tree last year for the first time! While sugar maple trees may have the highest sugar content in their sap, we found that our huge silver maple tree did a stellar job producing maple sap! It didn’t seem to differ much on the sap yield. It also didn’t really change how much sap we needed to produce a gallon of syrup.

So while sugar maples have the best sugar ratio in their sweet sap, you can still tap different species of trees. I think even if you don’t have the best trees, it’s well worth the effort to tap another type of tree. Especially when you have your own trees in your backyard! Just make sure you put in the maple spile at the ideal time on the south side of the tree and let the sap run!

I can’t wait to see if I have another type of maple tree on my property to try out!

How much syrup will I get from my sugar maple trees?

Will I get enough sap? This is a tough thing to answer. So many factors play into that — how many taps you can put on a tree, how much sap you’ll get from the tree, and what the sugar content of your sap is. Additionally, the weather conditions play a HUGE part in the volume of sap. I’ll break it down a bit for you.

How many tap holes can I put on my sugar maple trees?

Tapping a healthy sugar maple tree will not harm the tree if it’s done properly. The size of the tree is really important to know. If the diameter of the tree is less than 10″, don’t tap it! It isn’t healthy for a tree that size, because it needs all of its sap to keep growing. If you steal it’s sap, you might not have a tree there next year! However, if the diameter of the tree is over 10″, you’re free to tap away!

10″-20″ diameter: You can place 1 tap in this size tree

20-25″ diameter: You can place 2 taps in this size tree

25+” diameter: You can place 3 taps in this size tree

It’s important to mention that this is diameter, not circumference. You can use a tape measure to measure the circumference of the tree and then divide by 3.14 to get the diameter.

How much tree sap will I get?

On average, each tap will produce 10-20 gallons. The volume of sap is very dependent on the weather conditions, daytime temperatures, and nighttime temperatures. If you have a huge string of days that don’t go over freezing, there will be no sap flow.

Another consideration is which side of the tree is tapped. It’s recommended to tap on the south side of the tree, since that is where the sun hits and it will get the sap flowing. If the tap is on the North side, you’ll see a marked decrease in the amount of sap you’ll get. Additionally, if you tap too late in the season, you’ll also get less sap because the season is short. But on average, each spile will produce about 10-20 gallons.

How many gallons of syrup will I get from my sap?

On average, for 1 gallon of maple syrup, you’ll need to collect 40 gallons of sap. This is highly dependent on the sugar content of your maple sap. Remember when we were talking earlier about sugar maples being the best for maple syrup? That’s because their sugar content is the highest of any maple tree. The average maple sap contains 1-4% sugar. If your average sugar content is 2.5%, then you’ll get one gallon of syrup for every 40 gallons of tree sap. I think our trees are closer to the 4% range. The last 2 years, we have gotten 1.75 gallons from around 42 gallons of sap. Not bad!

So how much pure maple syrup will you get from your tree? Let’s say you’ve got an average sized tree with a 22″ diameter. You place 2 taps and get 20 gallons from each tap throughout the season. If you have an average sugar content, you can probably figure you’ll get about 1 gallon from that tree.

When do I tap maple trees?

Maple syrup season comes at a certain time of year – late winter when the weather conditions are right. You must have cold nights and warmer days – when the nighttime temperatures are below freezing, and the daytime temperatures are above freezing. I know there’s a ton of information about why this works, but I’m not super into science. I just know that the best time to tap is when there’s the highest sap flow. That occurs when it’s in the 20’s at night and 40-50’s during the day!

The season is relatively short for maple syrup. It’s often early February to the middle of March, but may start as early as late January and go until early April. It really just depends on the weather that year. You don’t want to put them in too early, because once you place the taps, they will flow for about 3 weeks before they begin to scar over. This year, we are going to place ours the first week of February.

Make sure to watch the weather forecast and choose a day that is above freezing to do the drilling. If you drill into the tree when it’s below freezing, it can crack the bark and leak sap out the crack 🙁 You don’t want your gallons of sugar maple sap to pour down the tree instead of in your sap bucket!

The end of the season is early spring when you notice the tree beginning to bud. As you’re collecting sap, make sure you often look to see if the buds are peeking out. As soon as this happens, the sap turns bitter and will make your syrup taste bad. That would be horrible to have all that hard work down the drain! So once those buds pop up, remove your taps!

Where do I put taps on a maple tree?

It’s often advised to put the tap hole below a large branch or above a large root. I try to keep mine within about 4′ of the ground because I chose spiles with 3′ tubes. When you add that to the height of the bucket, it keeps me around 4′ off the ground.

While you can get sap from any side of the tree, putting the tap hole on the south side of the tree will experience the highest exposure to the sun, thus will produce the most sweet sap.

I usually have 2 plastic taps attached to tubes running into each bucket, so I place the tap holes close enough together to be able to reach the bucket lid.

How do I tap a maple tree?

1. Once you’ve waited until the weather forecast shows that you’ll have nice warm days when the daytime temperatures will be above freezing and the nighttime temperatures will be below freezing, locate the south side of the tree above a large root or below a large branch.
2. Place a piece of tape on the drill bit about 1 1/2-2″ up so it matches the depth of your spile and prevents drilling too far into the tree.
3. Drill at a slight angle upwards until you reach the piece of tape.
4. Clean the hole out with a twig.
5. Insert spile into the hole with the tube pointing toward the ground and gently tap with a mallet. Do not hit too hard or you’ll crack the spile. Also, tapping too hard makes them really hard to remove in the spring.
6. Drill a hole in the lid of the food grade bucket.
7. Place the tube from the spile, into the bucket.
8. Check your buckets 1-2 times a day, depending on the weather. When it’s a beautiful sunny day, I’ve collected a full bucket in one day!
9. Store sap in a cool location.
10. Cook down into syrup within a week.

Watch my son teach you how to tap trees by clicking below!

Can I tap the same sugar maple trees next year?

Yes you can! You’ll want to make sure that you drill new holes each year. Because of the scar tissue the tree develops, tapping in the same spot won’t be effective. Best practices are to tap about 6″ from last year’s tap holes.

Additional tips for tapping maple trees:

*Always wash your buckets really well with hot water before using them. Many people will wash them, wash again with a bleach solution, then wash again with soap and hot water.

*The sap usually runs for about 3-4 weeks, and during that time period you need to be ready to cook it down once a week OR have lots of freezer space available to freeze the sap — so plan accordingly!

*Once you collect the sap, you MUST keep it cool. Think of it more like milk and less like water. Although it looks crystal clear like water, it can absolutely spoil like milk. Once we have a full bucket, we keep it in the garage. We put all the buckets tightly together to maintain the cool temperature.

*Sap needs to be cooked down within about 1 week, especially if it’s quite warm during the day. Don’t keep it too long because it’s super sad to have the sap go bad!

*Be ready to put the maple spile in right after the tap hole is drilled. You’ll start seeing the sap flow out immediately and you don’t want to waste any of that precious liquid!

Will I save money by making my own maple syrup?

Collecting and cooking down maple sap into syrup does have up front expenses associated with it. I was paying about $12/qt for maple syrup locally, so I saved approximately $84 the first year, which paid for a chunk of the up front cost. My second year, I produced another 1.75 gallons, so I saved another $84 which paid for the rest of the equipment we invested in. From here on out, it’s pretty much free to make!

I wouldn’t say that it is cheaper to make it yourself. When you figure your time into the equation, you may not find it to be worth it. With that said, I think it’s infinitely important to teach my family where our food comes from. I want them to know how to do stuff! And I want to spend time together doing things that are valuable. So for us, this replaces spending money on something like taking the family out to a movie and allows us to spend that money and time together in a way that builds memories and provides a tangible thing that we use together throughout the year. It has been and continues to be an amazing family experience for us!

Next week I will dive in to the boiling process of how to cook down the sap of a maple tree into maple syrup!

Have you made your own maple syrup? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments!

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