So, there is a season between winter and summer, I would even argue that its between winter and the good part of spring.  I call it the shit season… I’m sure people will disagree with me, after 6-7 months of winters grip on northern MN.  People are looking for any kind of spring.  But when the weather warms up it ruins the ski trails, making the snow mix with the mud.  It makes everything brown, different shades of brown but still brown.  I really cant do anything outside that I love but I have always looked at maple sapping as something that would fill this season, give me an excuse to actually enjoy the warm up before the flowers bloom and the ground dries up.

We have one major problem with maple sapping at the farm,  we only have three or four maple trees on the entire 40 acres.  And those tree are way in the back corner of the property.  Lets just say that it wouldn’t be worth the effort when we have friends that tap hundreds of maple trees near by.  So I started to look into tapping other trees and talked to some coworkers that have a lot of experience tapping trees.  Low and behold you can tap birch tree. You don’t see a lot of it in the lower 48 but in Alaska and Europe there is a booming industry.

Three years ago a co-worker and I started tapping birch trees in the spring as a experiment to see if it works and if we liked the taste.  Everything I had read indicates that birch syrup taste a lot different then maple. Some say its more like balsamic, something you really don’t want to put on your pancakes in the morning.  The first year was a low cost trial run, I tapped 6-8 trees and as I didn’t want to spend money I didn’t have bags or buckets.  What I did have was a million beer growlers.  So we drilled and tapped the trees and ran a tube down to the growler.  Do you remember what time of year this was… Yes it still freeze at night.  I learned quickly that glass growlers and frozen birch sap do not mix.  We refitted the trees with plastic milk jugs and we where back in business.

Second thing we learned is birch sap is 80-100 gallons to 1 (maple is 40-1), so there is a lot more boiling and doing it over a propane burner is a long….long…long process.  But, once we boiled down our first years sap we found this dark reddish brown syrup that we both liked.  We were hooked and plans for year two were discussed.  Major hold up, boil time. We had to cut down the boil time or it would take us days to boil down any kind of useable quantity.

Back to the internet, everyone that is anyone is using a pan to boil.  More surface area more evaporation. Pretty simple.  Well pans are expensive and we were still not 100% if this was going to be something that we wanted to spend 100s of dollars on.

One night around a bonfire with a couple beers and buddy stated that he could easy weld us up a couple pans.  A date was set and we head up to his shop to help make two boiling pans. Good thing for talented friends.

 

The pans went together pretty good. Looked like they would work and the second year I put in 15 taps, doubling year one.  One of the fun parts about tapping any tree is anticipation.  When is mother nature going to release that sweet clear sap to run skyward??  This year was a bit later than normal and we had heard that the maple season was utter shit.  Like some of the lowest flows ever seen.  But the birch tree without fail turned on and the sap started dripping.  With the extra milk jugs on trees it quickly became time to boil.  Birch sap is also a lot quicker to spoil and start to mold (not a good thing) so you have to boil often or risk loosing your hard earned goodness.

I set up a cinderblock fire pit and added a chimney to help the smoke stay off the pan.  Lit the fire and filled the pan.  Shockingly everyone was right, the boil rate was much better than a pot. HAHA science, shocking I know.  But it was still a long process but nothing wrong with sitting outside around a fire watching sap boil. Even into the late hours of the night.

The second year we must have done about 35-40 gallons of sap which made about 1/3 to 1/2 a gallon. Trust me, at times even I don’t know if this is worth all the effort but I keep doing it because I like the taste, its comes from our land and I hope for the boys to join the tradition in the near future.

So that brings us to this year, year three. When we get our first few warm days strung together, I start to think about this years upgrades and what worked last year. I really hated the plastic milk jugs, the cleaning, the constant checking to ensure nothing is spilling over. So I started to look into something better, bags, buckets, or some form of vacuum system. Sure if I had money coming out of my ears, vacuum would be great, but there is a huge up front cost that I couldn’t get my head around.  Then one day I was cruising craigslist, and there was old five gallon pickle buckets for sale and cheap.

I had some concerns about the pickle buckets imprinting their flavor on the sap but doing some internet search, as with anything, there were two camps. Some people say wash them out really good and use them… and others say that no matter how much you wash them your syrup will always taste like pickles. Well I talked to my friend and we decided to pull the trigger on some buckets. I picked up 30 to be all in.  Be damned pickle smell. If we can get cloth diapers to smell clean then pickle buckets should be nothing.

I was not around to pick them up but my friend told me that they smelled bad, crap. They did, wow they did. So I set them out in the winter sun for a little UV treatment, weeks of it.  And some if it worked. The smell was a lot less. Then I did a intense scrub, hot soapy water and a lot of elbow grease. By the time season rolled around there were some that had no smell and some that still had a little pickle smell to them. But I had to get taps in the trees. Mother nature said it was time.

So the taps went in, pickle smell be damned.

Its always a nervous time, did I put them in too early, too late.  Did I put the taps in too deep… not deep enough. Which trees are the best to tap. There are so many verables that one tries to control but then again its mother nature you are dealing with. This year I didn’t tap the same trees that I did the last two years. I know you can tap the same trees year after year if you rotate the hole location. But I just feel bad stealing the trees sap year after year. I still have a lot of birch trees to choose from, a lot of it came down to location to the house and carrying buckets out of the woods.

Twenty five taps in with five back up buckets. Wow was that a mistake. Once the run started I needed ten back up buckets. This years run was slow to start for me.  Only half my trees started around the same time and the other half 3-4 days later.  Once they started it was a full on sap deluge. Buckets filled with ease and we were off and running. The pan was scrubbed and fire was lit.  The season is always hectic as you have to boil pretty quickly to not have the sap spoil.  Boiling late in to the night, night after night starts out fun but quickly becomes taxing.

After the first boil we got to test this years run and it was as good as last. No pickle flavor, nothing off, color was good.  We can all our birch sap, not that you have to. The sugar content is high enough that it should be shelf stable, but we also don’t want to take a risk with such a time consuming process.

As the season trudges on I make sure the buckets are clean, the sap is clear and has little to no smell. You can always tell once the sap turns. It goes very cloudy and smells off.  Its unfortunate but I have dumped a bucket or two at the end of the season because I have let it sit to long.  Its one of the problems that I would like to solve in the next few years.

The weather gets warmer and the buds start to pop you look for changes in the sap, it will start to run cloudy and then you know the season is over. Its a bitter sweet feeling, you shoulders are sore from hauling buckets, there has been many late nights and questions if its all worth it. But it is, its an amazing feeling to create something special and unique.

Looking back on the season, I’m still glad we do it. We have a great group of friends that help and do it on other properties. Its fun to plan and see the differences in the trees.  So, next year will be year four and I hope to tweak the process even more.  There has been talk of building a full dedicated stove for the pan, making a preheating pan, getting more buckets and many other crazy ideas. What I do know is there will be years of birch sapping at the farm.

Till next spring when the Birch tree give us some of their special nectar.