MAPLE SUGAR

MAPLE SUGAR

FACTS ABOUT THE MAKING OF MAPLE SUGAR 1886

The first run sap will make the best sugar, it takes 16 quarts of sap to make a pound

of sugar. To “let” the sap you bore a ¼ inch diameter into the maple tree a inch and

a half. A sugar maple tree needs to be at least 15 years old until it is tapped.

The best sugar is light brown and syrup is amber color.

Use “spouts” of metal, tin pails with tops, vats of wood for holding with tops to keep out

rain and almost everything else. Boil the sap in iron potash pots set over a brick arch

with the fire. This fire archway is said best to be on the southern side of a hill, with a

running brook at the foot of the hill . Now you need an evaporator and “ sugaring off “

pan. The evaporator is a long shallow iron pans with dividers over a fire. The sap, strained three times, slowly proceeds as it boils, at 300 degree, for twenty minutes to the final divider and is now syrup that weighs 11 pounds per gallon. Here for syrup the product is drawn off

and strained , set off side to cool before going into gallon cans . For sugar it goes into the

“sugaringoff pans” at a high temperature of 400 degree until it forms in to crystals and then

packed it tin cans.

Abstract: Northumberland, Pennsylvania, Public Press , Friday, May 21, 1886.