My dad and I decided to try our hand at making the sweet stuff this spring. We read up on maple syrup and birch syrup on-line and in Dad's Back to Basics book, then jumped right in.
We started by tapping two birch trees on our property. It took a while before we got any sap, but we got our first cup or so on April 15th. Ever since, we've been harvesting the sap every day. As time went on, we tapped more trees, up to a total of six trees. We decided that was enough for our first attempt.
After filling most of our available containers with sap, we decided we'd better try boiling some of it down. We didn't have a special evaporater, but we did have an old electric stove in the garage. Dad got the stove hooked up just outside the garage, and we spent last Monday and Tuesday boiling down about 100 litres of syrup.We had read that it takes 80-120 parts birch sap to make one part birch syrup, so we weren't expecting to end up with a lot. By the end of three days, though, we had two small jars and two larger ones of birch syrup! 
I was very impressed with how sweet the syrup ended up tasting, because the sap was very much like water. It also has a distinct flavour, unlike anything else I can really compare it to...I guess that's the flavour of birch!
It was a fun experiment, and neat to end up with something that we made ourselves, out of sap from our own trees. Maybe next year we'll try it again.
In meantime, we'll be enjoying our harvest on pancakes and drizzled over ice cream!
2 comments:
Nice pictures and write-up, Julie! You'll have to save some for me.... :)
So nice, Julie. I've heard of it enough times but never really thought more of it. The ratio for maple syrup is 30:1 so you really had to work hard for it. I'm sure it tasted good. We made 5 gallons of syrup this spring and I think it's tasted better than any of our other batches. I guess we're getting a bit better at it.
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