How to Tap a Maple Tree with Arnold Coombs from Coombs Family Farms
To tap a maple, you’ll need a spout, a hammer, a bucket, a drill, and your parent’s permission. Then, find a sugar maple.
So, if you want to make a maple syrup at your house, you go out and find a sugar maple like this one. What we’re looking for is a sugar maple that has kind of a shaggy bark and you can look at a book and see how a leaf is and such. But the sugar maple gives us the best sap. The roots of the tree stores starch over the winter and it gets converted into sugars. So, the sap is going up through like water. We’re going to take a little bit of it out. But there’s really thousands of gallons going up through a tree over the course of a year. And we’re taking 10 gallons so it doesn’t hurt the tree.
This is a typical sugar maple. This one’s probably a 130 to 150 years old. And in tapping this, we’d walk up to it, just try to get—maybe on the south side, you can see the sun is down in this direction. Look for a big root. There’s a couple of good ones on this tree. Find a spot like here, nice and clean. What you’ll do is you’d take a bit and you’ll tap the tree, you’re going about an inch and a half, like the size of my little finger. And I’ll do that right now. Let’s pick a spot like that. Slightly uphill, so the sap runs down. You can see the sap dripping there, coming out of the tree.
Take a metal spout like that with a hook. You put it right into the hole and just tap it in with a hammer within snout not too far. And the sap will bit dam up behind that spout and eventually it’ll running out there. Here it comes and catch it with a bucket. Hang the bucket around the hook or if you have a milk jug, put that there. And then slide the cover on. Collect a little bit. Boil it down and then you have pancakes.