We tap ours. I
my sugar maples!
Tip #1: Get a medium-size clean garbage can, and line it with three heavy-duty bags. Put it inside a larger clean garbage can, and fill the gap with snow or icewater. Set it up on cinderblocks, and get a siphon to empty it into smaller containers. This is for holding sap you haven't boiled yet. On a nice day, four trees can produce a LOT more than you'd expect. You'll rapidly run out of room in the fridge, and then your spouse will yell at you for coming up with crazy crackpot ideas.
Tip #2: Boiling the majority of the sap on a woodstove or grill outdoors is most efficient energy-wise. Use disposable foil pans, not any pans you actually wanted to save for this process, because you will burn some. I boiled mine down till it was reduced to about 1/10th the original volume, then boiled it the rest of the way in a soup pot indoors. It took three months of scrubbing to get the soup pot back in useful condition. This also keeps your kitchen from getting too humid and sticky.
Tip #3: Boiling indoors, even though it's cold out, make sure you open windows to let the steam out of the kitchen. Also, you might want to temporarily disable the fire alarms, because they will go off too.
Tip #4: Buy about twice as many sap buckets as you think you will need. They will need to be emptied twice daily, and during maple season it will be dark when you get home from work--you won't feel like boiling sap and washing buckets in the dark. Better to save it up outside in the cold and then boil. If you have extra buckets, you can just swap them out.
This year, five taps provided a little over 2 gallons of syrup. Yum!
