NE Washtenaw county tapped today

[Kawierider]

Today marks the start of my second season making maple syrup. I'm small time as this is really just a good way to enjoy early spring for me.

I put my 12 taps out on 10 trees.

I also started an experimental pan to try and make boiling go faster this year.

When I drilled into the trees today, the wood was completely saturated with sap. Many of my buckets had nearly a half gallon in them after just over an hour, so despite not freezing last night, they are running well.

Looks like the next 4-5 days will be a good stretch here as long as it stays sunny during the day.

I debated waiting to tap, but I think this was the right time. I'm only regretting not getting them in on Thursday!

Last season I did two gallons of syrup and 8 gallons of maple wine, so hopefully I can improve on that a little.....

[BobMac]

Kawierider, my son makes wine an was asking if you could make maple wine.
then i see you post,how is it you make maple wine this sounds interesting ?

[Kawierider]

Hey, regarding the wine making, if he is already setup to make traditional wines or meads the process will be very easy.

I made two recipes last year, differing only because I was attempting a batch with two different types of yeast. This was the most successful recipe:

Batch 1:
1) boil sap down to a specific gravity of 1.125-1.130.(pull your sap off when 50 gallons gets down to about 5 and you'll be sort of close-if you've made wine before you'll probably have a way to measure s.g.)
2) add yeast nutrient (follow instructions on package)
3) add pectin enzyme( I didn't do this, and got peptin haze in my second batch, so it's a good idea)
4) add yeast. (Lalvin 1118 or high alcohol content champaign yeast)
5) let it ferment for a long time.

I did this batch with the idea that I wanted a country style wine, and I wanted to do as simple of a process as possible so I planned on the yeast fermenting until it died out from the alcohol content
. This isn't really good practice, but it worked. The yeast can go as high as 18% alcohol, and I wanted a very sweet dessert wine (I was fermenting maple syrup after all!) so my starting sugar content had to be very high compared to most wine recipes.

As a matter of fact, making maple wine is more similar to making a mead, so I found a lot of help on mead oriented websites. Basically follow recipes for a "traditional mead" and replace honey with syrup. Just be sure to use specific gravity as your target rather than volume in cups or weight.

The result was a very high alcohol content wine, that was also very sweet (so it balances well) it also had quite a bit of bourbon or smokey flavor to it (maybe because I boil over wood!?). It actually ended up with a specific gravity of 1.030 which is perhaps the sweetest wine I've ever come across. The good news: my wife LOVES it and so do most who've tried it.

This year I intend to boil the sap all the way to syrup before I dilute it and ferment. I also plan to let fermentation finish and then back sweeten: I'm really hoping this showcases the maple flavor much better.