(gentle music) - Who can give me one clue that you can use to go out there and find a sugar maple?

Go ahead.

- When it's opposite?

- [Lauren] So opposite what?

- Opposite branches?

- Everybody do that, opposite branching.

And you have to look up to find that.

But yeah, opposite.

- That's a sugar maple.

Good job.

That's an oak tree down there, that big one.

- So every year we go from the last tap hole, we go six inches over and up.

So this is where we're gonna tap it.

We're gonna put it in the tree.

And I'm wondering, should we, should we drill it in like this?

- No!

- No?

Why not?

- [Student] Because the sap won't come out.

- Right.

We wanna use gravity to help us.

We also don't though wanna do it like this either.

Not way down.

We wanna just do a slight, slight angle.

And when you come up here, look and see.

You'll see some white wood.

That is called the sapwood, and that's the layer of the tree we're trying to get in, we're drilling into.

So when you see that, you know we're getting close, okay?

(gentle music continues) - The physics and the chemistry that makes the sap flow happens when you have freezing nights and warm days.

That triggers the reaction within the cells of the trees that converts the starch to sugar.

And then it's basic physics that creates the pumping action.

In each cell, there's a little bit of gas, I mean, just a tiny bit.

Mostly CO2.

As it freezes that gas shrinks, it draws the solution that's in the vesicles of the tree up to that area.

As it warms up during the day, that gas expands and it forces that solution to an area of low pressure, which in this case would be the tap hole.

Basically for Southeast Wisconsin, it's the month of March.

- Okay, remember we made our sumac spiles or our poles?

Well, let's test and see if it really works, okay?

And this is why it's called tapping because you tap a spile into the tree.

- [Instructor] Let's be real quiet.

- [Lauren] Okay.

All right, let's see.

Okay.

- Yeah, it's coming!

- Is it coming?

- Yeah!

- Okay.

- Now.

- I can't see.

- I see it.

(gentle music continues) - All right.

What are we making?

- [All] Syrup.

- What kind of syrup?

- [All] Maple syrup.

- Everybody, like you know it!

What kind of syrup?

- [All] Maple syrup!

- All right, we're making maple syrup here, right?

We collected the sap from the trees that you folks helped us tap.

We're bringing it back here.

We're boiling the sap.

We call it an evaporator.

And the way it works is we build a fire down here.

We really get it hot.

The sap gets hotter and hotter, and pretty soon the sap starts to boil.

- So the evaporating process is two steps.

We have a reverse osmosis system.

From there, once it's concentrated, the RO unit will concentrate it from the roughly 2% to about 5% sugar.

Once we have it in there, we pump it up into the head tank up there.

And from there it's all gravity fed, and it feeds it into our evaporator system here.

The evaporator system is a two-stage system.

The first stage gets rid of about 70, 75% of the water before sugar.

And then our final stage here takes it to the syrup level.

And in order to get it to syrup, we need to have it at a concentration of about 66% sugar.

And to do that, we need approximately 43 gallons of sap for every gallon of syrup that we produce.

And then we test it to find out do we have the proper sugar content?

(gentle music) - [Don] This arrangement here, the level on the hydrometer should match the level on the dial, on the sample cup.

If the hydrometer is floating higher, then we've overcooked.

If it's floating lower, then we're undercooked.

- And when the numbers properly match, we have the correct sugar content.

And that's essentially the process.

(gentle music continues)