Let it Drip!

Yes! We have sap.

After feeding the goats this morning I wandered up the pasture to the maple tree to see what might have transpired over night. There was a very small trickle of sap going down the knife blade and into the bottle! I switched to a smaller bottle since it was so slow and when Josh and I went back up there this evening this is what we found.

We hung a new bottle and brought this one back to the house to boil down into syrup.

First we put on a pan of water and measured the temperature of boiling point for this ellevation (2069ft) and then set the sap on to boil. The finishing point for syrup is 7.1F above the boiling point of water. With such a small amount of sap it was difficult to know if we had an accurate reading as it was just a mass of frothy bubbles. So we kind of had to hope for the best and guess a little. It could probably have been boiled down a bit further but once it turned light amber and the amount was a lot less that we started with ( this is also the redneck fuzzy math method) I decided to stop it there. With larger batches that are going to be stored I would make sure it was just right, but this was going to be consumed in no time flat!

And look what we got....