The syrup season is underway, but only after a great deal of careful preparation. After the sugar shack construction, our next chore was to banish the bacteria from our equipment. Now, before you let loose with an “ewwww… gross,” let’s be clear. Our maple sap boils at 212 degrees for a minimum of 5 hours, and then the syrup finishes at 219 degrees. So any bacteria that sneak into the sap are long gone by the time we bottle up our liquid gold.
Besides, the bacteria we’re fighting isn’t harmful to people. However, it is hungry. Ravenously hungry. The bacteria eat up some of the precious sugar in the sap, and there’s a surprisingly low level of sugar in maple sap to begin with. It doesn’t even taste sweet, straight out of the tree. Which is why the normal ratio of sap to syrup is 40 to 1: forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. But a batch that’s fallen victim to hungry, sugar-slurping bacteria will take even more sap to create the same amount of syrup. So it behooves us to be diligent in the cleanliness of our equipment. We boiled all our aluminum taps for several minutes on the kitchen stove, a technique perfected over the past few years of sanitizing new baby bottles & pacifiers. Then our buckets all got a bath in bleach to ensure squeaky-cleanness… all one hundred of them. Wash. Rinse. Rinse again. Third rinse is a charm. Repeat ninety-nine times. Collapse.
