Maple Syrup is a classic staple of the American breakfast menu. But, like so many food items, I just love seeing how it’s sourced. This video shows a Yukon man tapping a maple tree for sap, and it looks pretty simple and rewarding. If you’ve got maple trees on your property or nearby you, why not give it a try this summer?
There’s a separate process for boiling the sap to make the syrup, so I’ll have to find a video on that later this month perhaps. In the meantime, enjoy! Alaskans are some of the most hard-core homesteaders there are, seriously.
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2 thoughts on “Tapping a Maple Tree”
Here in Wisconsin (and all northern climates, you don’t tap trees for sap for maple syrup “in summer”, as you suggest. You tap in spring, when sap is returning to tree from roots where it’s stored during the cold winter.
I have been tapping trees in CT for a number of years. I do Urban Maple. I live in an urban environment and tap mine and my neighbors trees. collect the sap in anything and everything that will hold water and boil it down in a rig in made from old heating oil containers (very much cleaned up and NO residual oil). I use wind fall or power lined cleared wood to boil it off. I started with traditional taps as shown here but I have since moved on to plastic taps that are designed to connect together in the forest to drain the whole forest into vats near the sugar shack. I don’t have that concentration of trees but I use the plastic taps and short plastic tubing to run into 5 gal buckets with lids and holes cut just the size of the tubing so I get NO trash, snow melt or rain in the sap. To honor the trees a bit more I use a hand held bit and brace which cuts a cleaner hole for the tap and I am sure to sterilize everything I use (Drills, taps, and tubing) first to help keep the trees healthy. I share the end result with the owners of the trees when i am done. It is a GREAT community building project. Within about 2-3 city blocks I have run nearly 50 taps. You can run about 1 tap per foot in diameter of the tree.