It is with a heavy heart that I am officially closing-out maple syrup season. For us it’s been a bit of a bust thanks to temperatures hitting too high, too early in the season. We collected less sap this year than last year, and cooked it down into fewer gallons.
However, nothing is a complete bust if you’ve managing to come away from it learning something new and useful. And this year we really did!
Way back when we visited the maple syrup warehouse to buy our supplies, the owner showed us a newly completed research paper that showed how using new taps every year could increase your sap production significantly.
Erik was incredibly skeptical, but we bought 25 new taps as a test to see if the research was correct.
Guess what?
When the production slowed on our trees, and out of 150 old taps we’d have roughly 10 buckets with maybe 2 gallons each, ALL our new taps had AT LEAST 2 gallons, some even 5! The trees were tapped at the same time and in the same area, but those new taps ALL OUT PERFORMED THE OLD TAPS.
It was a bittersweet discovery. We now knew to buy all new taps next year, but had we done it this year we could have quadrupled our syrup this year.
WHY DOES IT MATTER?
The taps we use are plastic (I’m not sure if metal taps have the same issues), and plastic is slightly permeable. Bacteria can find tiny niches and stay dormant even after washing thoroughly (which is nearly impossible with a tap anyway). When it once again has warm, sugary, tree sap flowing through it, the bacteria begin multiplying and spreading along the tap until it reaches the tree. The tree senses the bacteria and instantly begins trying to heal itself to prevent rot. It starts to seal over the hole.
The minute temperatures reach 50 degrees, that bacteria begins multiplying like crazy and the tree begins to close.
Long ago, taps were made of metal, and were much larger. It’s very likely they never had this issue before. With the invention of “tree-friendly” taps in smaller diameters and made out of plastic, the issue of taps closing too early seems to be a new one.
Bottom line: if your season seems to be less productive than it should have been, buy new taps every year. They make cheaper, disposable taps for this very purpose.