Being away during the week means I sometimes miss fun stuff. Like a newly-developed family hobby of making maple syrup. For now I'll show you what I discovered about it with my own pictures. In this photo we see a modern tap on a tree with a tube leading into a recyclable container. The sap which comes out of the tree should be clear, and doesn't have much flavour. Collecting sap from maple trees takes place in early spring, when the days are above zero, and the nights below. Sap collection ends when bud begin to form on the trees, or when the nights are no longer cold enough.
The next step is to boil down all the collated sap. There may be multiple boilings during the sugar season, and at the end you get different grades of syrup. My uncle has a good picture of different bottles lined up which shows the different shades of sap representing the different times during the season when sap was boiled down. Since it's just a hobby, we don't need any full-sized production equipment; an old stove in a woodshed and a couple of boiler pans are good enough to get the job done. The lower pan holds the more concentrated sap, and the top pan is used to pre-heat the sap before emptying it into the lower pan. Once the lower pan gets too full, it is emptied into a pot (which can be brought into the house) where it is boiled down further to the final grade of syrup.
Here the syrup is strained into their final resting place (in bottles- traditionally glass) before they are left to cool, and then gobbled up with pancakes. Fact - natural syrup does not taste like the sugar liquid you get in the store. it has a more distinct flavour (which differs depending on the grade and wether or not you burned it), and is possibly an acquired taste.
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