The following was written by our friend William. William is a “Pratt Kid.” It was written for his own blog… found here….Williams Blog This is the first in a series of two from William.

Maple Syrup part 1

On February 13, 2013 I tapped my first maple tree at the Pratt Nature Center in New Milford Connecticut.

The process is begun by selecting a maple tree, and then taking your equipment out to it. To best tap a tree, you need a bucket, hammer, drill, and tap. You will then have to drill a hole into the bark of the tree. The depth of the hole can be determined by the thickness of the bark, which is proportional to the size of the tree. You will have to drill down until the bark on the inside of your hole becomes white and mushy. Hopefully, sap will immediately come trickling out of the hole. The sap is slightly yellow in color and is as thin as water. It is not sticky at all.

Depending on the tree size, the hole can be anywhere from 1 to 3 inches deep. A tap is then hammered into the tree until it doesn’t wiggle around, or fall out. A bucket then has to be suspended below the tap, in order to catch the sap.

After one night, you should have at least one bucketful of sap per tree, depending on what time you put the taps in, and what size bucket you use.

The ratio of water to sugar in the sap is 40/1, so the plain sap is not very sweet. In order to isolate the sugar in the sap, the water must be boiled out of it. Because of the sugar/water ratio, it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.

The longer you boil the sap, the more concentrated the sugar becomes, and the less you will have.

Maple Syrup part 2

On February 16, 2013 I went to the Pratt Center again to boil down the sap that had been previously collected. First, Drew (my teacher at the Pratt Center), my Dad, and I collected the sap from the trees. We emptied the sap into a five gallon bucket, and carried over to a fire pit. After the fire was constructed, we set up a tripod with a pot suspended from it. The sap slowly began to boil, and soon we were able to empty a small amount of it into another pot. Over the three hours that we were there, we had only boiled about 12 cups of sap, and gotten less than a cup of syrup back. This process helped me to appreciate the making of maple syrup much more. My favorite part was the smell of the burning sugar residue after the pot was emptied. Click on the pictures below to view them larger.