Originally Posted by
Cangooner
You missed step four: taking what collects in the bucket and boiling most of it off. On average it takes somewhere around 40 litres of sap to make one litre of syrup. As it comes from the tree, the sap is very watery with just a hint of sweetness. I think it actually tastes great like that and am just waiting for someone to market it as a health drink. :)
Anyway, after it's collected, the sap is put in some kind of boiler or other and reduced until it has a high enough sugar content. Then it is bottled. And *then* we proceed to the whisky, beer, moose, and hockey stick portions of our days.
Most big operations now have connected their trees with lines/hoses that collect the sap and run it direct to where it is collected. When you are tapping hundreds of acres of trees, that's a lot of running around with buckets.