Tree Tapping thread

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Waff

Waff

True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
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Jul 13, 2022
I noticed we didn't have a thread on this and I felt since its spring time it is perhaps the best time to talk about this. Initally I thought tree tapping was limited to maple, then I found out birch is a common one as well and now Im learning that there are tons of (non pine) trees that, even unresearch can be tapped for sap after watching this video;

with that said, have you tapped any trees? What are your methods on tapping? Do you use a drill? do you hammer a spile directly into the tree? Whens the best time you have found to go out and do this?
 
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I've been doing DIY maple syrup for a couple years now, so I can answer a few questions. Typically it's not worth tapping any tree with a trunk diameter less than 1 foot. You won't get enough sap and it may harm the tree. 1 tap per foot of trunk diameter is typically safe for the tree, so a tree 2 feet wide can handle 2 taps. You can use a cordless drill to get about 1 to 1.5 inches deep and hammer the taps in. I've been using these taps for a couple years and they're reliable enough. Stainless steel taps are much better than plastic taps and won't break off in the tree if you pull them wrong. Don't reuse the tubing, it's not worth cleaning. Get some 5 gallon food safe buckets to hold the sap as it drains. The best time to get sap is typically late winter to early spring before the tree buds, specifically when it's below freezing during the night and above freezing during the day. As the tree buds you'll get much less sap and it may change the flavor. It's really not worth tapping maple trees the rest of the year. Sap can go bad so it's best to empty the buckets every day to every other day. You can keep it in the fridge for about a week and freeze it indefinitely past that. Make sure to boil the sap outside, otherwise you'll get everything covered in a sticky residue. Strain the sap before putting it in the pot. You can boil it until it's a nice dark brown or around 216-218F. Than I filter it with one of these filters to get the sugar sand out and any remaining residue in a second pot. Boil it until you get to the desired thickness and wait until it cools to around 180F. Than filter one last time before bottling it. It's about 40:1 ratio of sap to syrup, but it's well worth it.
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Slavs drink birch juice. You can only get it during, like, a single week in early spring, though. Also depends on the weather, pretty similar to what I've read about maple juice. I'm pretty sure I already missed the window in my local area.
Did it several times with an older friend as a kid. Used a knife, a straw picked off the nearby field and a glass jar to collect the juice, nothing fancy. No drills or anything that'd fuck up the tree too much.
Tastes... very fresh, not too sweet. Nothing special if you're used to guzzling sodas and energy drinks (like I am these days), but I remember it very fondly. The taste of home, spring and childhood.
Spoils very fast, though, and doesn't have enough sugar in it for syrup. Try it if you got birches, but be careful, I've always been told that taking too much can kill the tree very easily.
 
CasketBase said:
Slavs drink birch juice. You can only get it during, like, a single week in early spring, though. Also depends on the weather, pretty similar to what I've read about maple juice. I'm pretty sure I already missed the window in my local area.
Did it several times with an older friend as a kid. Used a knife, a straw picked off the nearby field and a glass jar to collect the juice, nothing fancy. No drills or anything that'd fuck up the tree too much.
Tastes... very fresh, not too sweet. Nothing special if you're used to guzzling sodas and energy drinks (like I am these days), but I remember it very fondly. The taste of home, spring and childhood.
Spoils very fast, though, and doesn't have enough sugar in it for syrup. Try it if you got birches, but be careful, I've always been told that taking too much can kill the tree very easily.
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I think I recall a recipe with old birch juice where you make a wine with it that takes like 50 years to ferment and I think it was russian...I forget though.
 
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Starting to get a little late in the season now. I tapped a few trees this year and have some half-boiled sap. You want to filter the sap at least twice - once before boiling and at least once after you start boiling it. I would guess the filters you can get on ebay are well worth it.
 
Evan Kor said:
Starting to get a little late in the season now. I tapped a few trees this year and have some half-boiled sap. You want to filter the sap at least twice - once before boiling and at least once after you start boiling it. I would guess the filters you can get on ebay are well worth it.
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what types of trees have you tapped? just maple?
 
Usually I tap the tree with the back of my hatchet. Checking to see if there is any hollows, defects and rot. The sound of the thud changes from solid word, which is more a clear sound vs rotten wood or a void, which has a duller, thud sound to it.
As collecting syrup, there are red maple, Florida maple (closely related to sugar maple) and river birch here. Sugar maples suffer here. Here the window for sap collecting and the variable weather doesnt allow for sufficient quantity or quality to gathered.
I have wanted to grow sorghum for sorghum molasses and sugar cane though.

Pine sugar can be collected from the sap that gathers on the preemergent buds, from white and Scot pine. Those unfortunately dont grow here, and I am not sure if sap production on local yellow pines species is enough to be worth while.
 
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Waff said:
I think I recall a recipe with old birch juice where you make a wine with it that takes like 50 years to ferment and I think it was russian...I forget though.
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If you're fermenting anything that takes more than a month to finish you've done something terribly wrong. Pretty much all of the stuff that comes out a tree straight is going to be too low in sugars to even ferment let alone into anything worthwhile. 100g of sugar per litre or an sg of 1.050 will end in a 6%abv. Looking online you'd probably need to boil birch sap to 1/5th of the original volume to get a cider from it.
 
Boldizar said:
Isn't wine fermented for months and even years?
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Most fermentations are finished in a week, fortnight at the absolute most. After that there is 0 fermentation. There is no living yeast or fermentable sugars. Wine is left to age for months but that's not fermenting. That's just because it needs time to mellow out and not taste like shit. Grape juice goes into a big vat, stays there to ferment for a week or two, then it's put into normal wine bottles and left to age, once it is in those wine bottles the abv does not change at all. If you drank it at that point you would get just as drunk as if you left it to age for a year, it would just taste worse. The higher the abv the more off flavours the ferment will create so the longer it has to sit to mellow out.
 
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