West Coast Maple Syrup?

Who knew you could tap maple trees on the west coast and make your own maple syrup? 

This is a project we have wanted to try for a while.  Last year we ordered supplies from Atkinson Maple Syrup Supplies in Ontario.  We ordered their Beginner Kit which consists of ten plastic spiles, ten buckets, and a whole lot of other things to get you started - enough to get a taste for tapping trees, or as they call it back east, "Backyard Sugarin'". 

Next we looked for suitable trees.  Here on the West Coast you can tap big leaf maple trees (which are fairly common), red maples, sugar maples (if you are lucky enough to find them big enough), as well as birch trees. 

Big Leaf Maple

 Luckily, there were a good number of Big Leaf maples in the forest at the back of our property.  There were a few good birch trees back there as well. 

We waited for the temperature to drop and started tapping!

The amazing thing about the West Coast is that you can basically tap all winter long.  Anytime it freezes overnight and then warms up by about ten degrees or so during the day, the sap will usually start running.  In our case, it started running as soon as we drilled into the tree.

Within minutes the sap started flowing pretty good.

When we had collected about 25 litres or so we took it in the house and started boiling it down.  The ratio we found was about 40 to 1.  We ended up with just over half a litre of maple syrup after about 3 hours worth of boiling.

Here is a collage of pictures of the entire process right through to the finished product.

West Coast Maple Syrup - probably the best tasting maple syrup I have ever tasted!

- John Briner