Return to Area Profiles Table of Contents 

Maple Sugar—A Native American Product
Researched and Written by Janine Weins
(Posted 3/21/07)

A tap used to tap trees on Acorn Hill Farm more than half a century ago!

Buckets hang from an old maple tree on Thetford Road in Lyme.

An Iroquois legend maintains that Chief Woksis discovered that the sap from maple trees was sweet when the morning after his hatchet cut into a maple tree he tasted the liquid that had collected in a container at the base of the tree. Others believe it was sapsicles, from stubs where branches had been broken from maple trees, that revealed the sweet taste of maple sap.

Because maple syrup was more difficult to store than sugar, Native Americans and early European settlers boiled most of their maple sap down to sugars: grain sugar, a course granular crystalline sugar; cake sugar, a softer sugar that was poured into wooden molds; and wax sugar, a taffy-like sugar.

Maple sugars quickly became the sweetener of choice for early European settlers. In the early 1800s, maple sugar was about half the price of cane sugar. In the 1860s, maple sugar production peaked. As cane sugar prices fell and methods for canning maple syrup were perfected, maple syrup began to exceed maple sugar production. Currently, only a small fraction of maple sap is made into maple sugar. In 2006, the U.S. production of maple syrup was 1.45 million gallons, up 17 percent from 2005. Vermont led the nation with 33 percent of the U.S. production.

Sap, the fluid that nourishes the tree, flows from the roots to the branches when the days begin to thaw. Sugaring season, a time of year with freezing nights and thawing days thus depends on the weather. The season includes stretches of days between mid-February and mid-April.

Trees are tapped by drilling 1.5 inches into good wood. If the tree has thick bark, the hole needs to be 2.5 inches deep. Taps, which are about a half-inch in diameter, are driven into the bored holes. Only one tap should be placed on a tree 10–17 inches in diameter. A tree 18–24 inches in diameter can have two taps, while a tree 25 inches in diameter can manage three. Trees are not damaged by tapping. A 15-inch diameter tree produces about 150 gallons of sap in a season. Each tap takes from the tree about 10 gallons.

Collected sap is boiled in an evaporator. The concentrated sap is syrup when the temperature is 7ºF above the boiling point of water, or about 219ºF. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. Maple sap is 2% sugar, syrup is about 70% sugar.

To make maple sugars the syrup needs to be further concentrated by boiling. Soft maple sugar can be made when the temperature reaches between 238ºF and 242ºF. To make hard maple sugar that crystalizes, the boiling temperature needs to be between 250ºF and 256ºF. To make maple sugar with a taffy-like consistency for sugaring on snow, the sap needs to be boiled until the temperature is between 268ºF and 270ºF.

New Hampshire Maple Producers Annual Open House Weekend is March 24th and 25th. To find a sugar house near you that is open to the public visit their site at

        http://www.nhmapleproducers.com/weekend.html