Maple Season 2020.

Greetings from the Localrootz Homestead!

It has been awhile and I wanted to thank everyone who over the last couple years, has utilized the past blogposts for help with their own homesteading as well as reaching out with questions and advice! It has truly been a whirlwind of a few years with my wife Cassi and I welcoming a child into our lives. Hazel who is now 3 is full of curiosity, humor, love and even a little of dads stubborn work ethic! Projects slowed down a bit around the homestead but slowly but surely we are working our way back to a self sustainable lifestyle. Anyhow I don't want to get too personal or wordy to get things on the blog rolling once again, so on to maple syrup season 2020!

One new addition to the tool shed is this lovely sled from LL Bean that Hazel loves and sometimes Daddy finds useful for projects like this, its tapping time!

I think in all we tapped about 12 trees this season, and it started off great, but froze up quickly, then came on strong again two weeks later. It was a little touch and go but in the end we ended up with about 50 gallons of sap for boiling day!

Im always so grateful for the land in which our homestead inhabits, especially when the relationship seems to mutually beneficial!

Our rustic sap house, basically an iron grate spread across the firepit with two buffet pans from a restaurant supply shop.  The great thing about sugaring is I think the first year I spent $150ish dollars on supplies and since then its cost nothing but time and energy to make at least a gallon of syrup for the homestead every year, this being our 4th season!

Having a good amount of wooded acreage on our homestead means wood is usually easy to acquire, especially in the Spring season when all the blow downs from the winter are dry and plentiful!

The boil takes a longtime with these methods, I think I got the fire started around 6:30am and by 10pm I had it reduced enough to move it inside onto our cookstove where I could finish it off and monitor it more closely!

After boiling it down to taste, I cold crash it in the fridge overnight which helps clarify the syrup as the floaties tend to drop to the bottom of the pot. I then use a piece of layered cheesecloth to line a fine screened colander for a final filtering. Bringing the syrup back to one last boil, we then checked the brix levels with a hydrometer to ensure our syrup is of the right sugar content and consistency!

After sanitizing some corks and bottles we fill them and cork them!

The final haul for this year:

2- 750ml bottles

6- 375ml bottles

Time to make some pancakes! 

In reality we use it for much more than pancakes, in fact we use it instead of sugar for baking or ice cream making and one of Hazels favorite treats is roasted carrots with salt pepper and a drizzle of maple syrup! YUM.

Stay tuned as I resuscitate this blog back into proper form. Rather than just posting about homesteading though, be ready for music reviews, artistic musings and just general ranting and sharing as I navigate this new land of uncertainty and opportunity!

Sap ferments and syrup drippings. (Part Two)

Maple Wine

After a long 16 hour boil on Saturday during the peak of sap season a few weeks ago, I told myself I would take the day off from boiling and use Sunday to get some indoor "winter" projects finished. But the heavy buckets drip dropping in the midday sun gave me the motivation to get a boil going and make sure no sap went to waste.  Part of that motivation also came from the idea that todays boil would be destined for a maple wine. Maple wine requires a slightly less concentrated solution than syrup does which shortens the time spent stoking the fire.

Not really having planned this out, I searched the kitchen for some flavor additions to add some complexity and creativity to the project.

I took a little walk through the woods and snipped some fresh spruce, pine and cedar boughs, then found a couple organic tangelos in the fruit dish, a couple bags of rishi ginger tumeric tea, a few dashes of Coastal Root bitters and some overwintered lemon thyme from the garden.

I did a little online research and the common theme in the diverse recipes I found called for a boil of 12:1 of sap. Meaning to boil 12 gallons to make a final one gallon batch. I had about 25 gallons and boiled it down originally to just under 3 gallons in the same we we boil sap for syrup.

I did use liberal amount of boughs in the boil and even tented the trays with some tinfoil to add a more pronounced smokiness to the sap by trapping it with the foil.

I used the freshly snipped boughs to slowly strain the final couple gallons of sap destined to be maple wine and let it steep for 24 hours.

I then proceeded to give the batch a lazy strain with a colander and took some quick hydrometer readings to measure just how much sugar was present in the liquid. It ended up being slightly under the recommended target for a dry wine which is 1.080 - 1.090 so I boiled it down from just under 3 gallons closer to 2 as well as adding a cup or two of maple syrup from yesterdays batch to bring the sugar content up. Essentially the amount of sugars you have present in the liquid results in the amount of alcohol that you produce when the yeast does what it is supposed to do. Im not going to get much more technical than that because number one Im no expert and number two Im quite sure most people don't really care. That being said I will briefly describe the process...

The final liquid is brought down to room temperature, I sped up the process by simply placing the boiling pot in a tub of ice and trickled fresh cold water into the bath as I watched the temperature come down to the mid 80˙s.

I pulled a final sample and chilled that down to 60˙ to achieve an accurate hydrometer reading.

The starting gravity of this batch of maple wine ended up being 1.092 which is right where I wanted to be for this first batch. 

When I had my gravity dialed in and the batch was ready to start fermenting I stirred up a small starter of just over 3 grams of Premier Cuvee yeast and got it foaming using the warming spot on our stove.

Into the carboy the yeast went... bubbling and burping just hours later.

Its been a steady fermentation for the last week or so and Im curious to give it a sample and see how its progressing. Will update on the progress as I learn and discover !