birch syrup making in a nutshell

[twobears1224]

ok,i have 9 paper/white birch trees tapped..i have no clue how to get sap to syrup..this will be my first time making birch syrup..i have read a bunch of posts on here about it..what,i see is ro if you can,then heat the syrup to nomore then 212 degrees f till it,s done at 66deg Brix..is that it?? i have roughly 9 gallon of sap so far..right now i have in in my chest freezer..i don,t have my ro setup yet so i figured i,de let it freeze to get rid of some of the water..it tested 0.5 today right from the tree.i plan on heating it with propane in my canner to get it reduced down..then rig up a waterbath deal using the canner i made to finish it.

[Moser's Maple]

twobears
i believe it's 60 brix not 66 brix.....may want to do a little more research....also don't want to boil as hard a maple.... can go on facebook and find Mike Farrell with cornell and ask him a bunch of questions....he should be more than happy to answer anything for you.

[Scribner's Mountain Maple]

Yeah I agree with Moser's. Contact Mike Farrell. He is the person who instructed me on what to do. He said he boiled the heck out of it and took it to 66 brix on his arch. He was very helpful.

[fishman]

I boiled down 120 gallons last year to 66 brix and took it slow and easy on the boil and only got 3 quarts. Probably lost a pint in the filters. Tasted too bitter for to me to put on pancakes but it makes a great marinade for fish or meat.

[BC Birch Tapper]

You're right it is not a breakfast syrup, it has more of a cooking application tan as a pancake syrup.
We've had some studies done at a lab and only take ours to 60 deg brix.

[fishman]

Does the taste change much in those last 6 degrees.

[BC Birch Tapper]

not much but the big thing is the more you heat it the darker it becomes & the bolder the flavour. The higher the brix the easier it is to burn or scorch it. I always say you're not a true birch syrup maker until you've burnt some....& I'm a syrup maker.

[twobears1224]

heres the first birch syrup i,ve ever made.

[twobears1224]

i looked on facebook but,i couldn,t find mike because theres like a million of them..i,de really like to talk to him tho..

[Run Forest Run!]

That's great! So what's your verdict on the taste? Are you going to keep making more?

[twobears1224]

i,am going to make more..as far as the taste.. i,am don,t know what to think..i thought coming from a birch tree it would have a minty favor..it doesn,t at all. it smell good with a fruity smell but it,s strong favored wiht a taste i,ve never had before..i don,t even know what to tell people on how it tastes.
i was just winging it on this batch so i,am going to make more and use what i,ve learned to do the next batch.i made this one alittle heavy.i think now i know what to look for as it boils and gets close.it doesn,t seen to thicken up like maple syrup as it boils until the bitter end then it thickens fast.

[Moser's Maple]

he is under Michael Farrell (Cornell) he is married to Andrea St. John
hope this helps narrow him down

[BC Birch Tapper]

looks good. It is a much different taste than maple, after all it is a different tree with different sugars which behave differently. THe big thing is to keep the heat low the closer you get to a finished product to avoid burning or scorching

[MillbrookMaple]

Anyone know what the signs to look for to know when the birch season is ending. We just finished up Maple season and put in 85 birch taps this afternoon and they are running well. I plan to be around 250 taps in by tomorrow night and 400 by Wed night. I figured that the trees probably started running last Wed or Thursday and stopped over the weekend when it froze. I am probably one week behind, especially with a short season to start with! I was wondering how I will know the season is ending. Maple is easy, I can tell by the smell and the taste but birch is so new for us. Last year it was easy with the birch, since it was 80+ degrees and we couldn't keep the sap from spoiling.

[BC Birch Tapper]

Birch sounds similar to maple. WHat happens is the sugars in the sap begin to ferment & get cloudy. You can smell it. Typically this is associated with warmer temperatures. WHen we collect our sap we filter it. For the majority of the season it flows through freely, but when we're near the end it is slower to pass through a filter.

[heus]

Can you tap river birch for syrup?

[BC Birch Tapper]

You can tap all birches & all maples

[RyanB]

I tapped around 30 yellow birch's yesterday (pulled all the maples, cleaned 30 and sunk them in). Landed up having 45 gallons today and thought before I wanted to try all of it I would do a little taste test in the house. Boiled down a good 1.5 gallons and it deffinatly has a different flavour than Maple and like stated above is very hard to describe. Smells almost nutty but has more of a caramel flavour???? Out of that 1.5 gallons I landed up with just over an inch in a pint mason jar! I will probably boil tomorrow in the arch like normal until the colour starts to change and then go slow and finish off on propane until finished. If nothing else...it will be a new experiance!

[Snowy Pass Maple]

Last year we still made birch syrup successfully after the warm spell, but only after replacing all the buckets with freshly washed ones and maintaining a 3-day replacement schedule on every bucket. This year, we went to tubing and central collection barrel that is easier to change out. Sugar content this year has been much lower - only 0.3% vs. 0.6% last year, but today finally got up to 0.5% and hopefully will stay there or higher for a few days. Same readings on tubing output or buckets. (I left a couple just to verify tubing doesn't degrade sugar...) Seems like the cold snaps are corresponding to lower sugar as we hit 0.6% briefly during last warm spell. Michael Farrell says he's heard of birch trees read as low as 0.1% - we were 0.2% for at least a week during which we didn't bother collecting.

I suspect in NY, we're making birch sap in warmer temps than BC - snow is long gone and it can often can reach high 50s / low 60s during the day. This is a fierce battle against microorganisms. The birch sap seems to get cloudy and yeasty almost immediately even in a clean bucket, so we are now sending it through a UV immediately after collection which seems to help stabilize it for RO. While tap water UVs are not regarded to do much with maple due to sugar absorption, at the very low sugar level of birch sap, this should be less of a problem. I also run it through much slower than the minimum rating to ensure better residence time and hopefully improve kill rate. Also making 5 gallon ice blocks.

For us last year, we noticed that the tapholes just finally started plugging up spouts with visible snot and the flow and sugar quickly died off.

[RyanB]

I suspect in NY, we're making birch sap in warmer temps than BC - snow is long gone and it can often can reach high 50s / low 60s during the day.

Well, after boiling down the sample I was very unpleased with the taste. It seemed to have some of that "buddy" taste that the maples have right at the end of the season and even the sap durring the boiling process had a hint of it! This got me to thinking today about exactly what you said Snow Pass Maple agove....could it be that although birch tapping in the far west happens directly at the end of Maple season...could it be they are indeed a few weeks behind our birch run? I am wondering if I would have tapped and tried to boil some a week or two ago if it would have had better results? I am planning on doing my hole bush on vacume next year so I will have 85 buckets that I could tap into the birch's nice and early!

Ryan

[BC Birch Tapper]

Could be at the end of the season where you are. We've only got a few days left. One thing to consider, that if you tap a dry tree you will never get the same production than f you tap during the flow. That may not make a difference on a vacuum however. We just use buckets

[RyanB]

my test tree a few weeks ago was dry...but these at the begining of the week I tapped were deffinatly not dry! I didn't get the drill bit out of the tree and it was almost spraying out with what seemed like a pulsating spray as if the tree had a heart beat! All 25+ taps I put in did this exact same thing and filled up the 3 gallon buckets in less than 12 hours. Could have been an off taste from the yellows though???

[BC Birch Tapper]

Sounds like you're right in the thick of it. The yellows may may bit of difference as you've indicated.

[MillbrookMaple]

Here is a report from our neck of the woods. A third of our taps this year are yellows, Last year is was about 80% yellows. We finally got to boil tonight and we found that the syrup was milder in flavor than last years. It could be the percentage of yellows or just a different season or our process. Everything is different this year. Last year the yellows were very slow running and the whites where off the charts. This year they are running about the same amounts. Last year we had around .3% sap this year it has been between .4-.5% We collected 125 gallons Tuesday, 150 yesterday and 250 today. Each day we ran the sap through the RO recirculating until there was nothing left and then drained the RO which was about 15 gallons of concentrate. Then we brought it to a boil each day to kill off any thing that might cause the sap to spoil. Today's concentrate was around 8% and the other two days homogenized to around 5%. We only drew off about a quart or 2 but the evaporator is sweet so now it should start flowing. Tomorrow I will put in the last 40-50 taps which should put us over 300 for this year. Hopefully we will see some 400-500 gallon sap days!
I see that it is supposed to be a low of 26 Saturday and low of 28 Sunday. From my understanding that will stop the birch sap for a few days. Is this true? Also what does that do to the sugar content and flow once it starts back up.

[BC Birch Tapper]

Temps below freezing will stop the flow, but if is it is only just below freezing it will start to flow again once temps back are above. That being said a few years ago we had very cold temps in April - 17 deg C & it never started flowing again unit the temps were above + 10 C.