The maple syrup is not so well-known as UConn’s ice cream… but it should be! At the end of each winter, members of the UConn Forestry and Wildlife Club bring out the taps, buckets, and tubes to collect maple sap. They bring it to the sugar house and boil it down to make syrup. Uconn has a few stands of forest dominated by sugar maples (Acer saccharum), and we call these “sugarbushes”. Sap is collected on these locations, boiled down at UConn’s own sugar house for teaching others about the process, and of course for the production of delicious forest products! If you happen to catch our syrup for sale at a CAHNR pop up shop or other event, know that all the proceeds go back into the stewardship of the UConn forest.

The buckets hang on the trees in the early spring before the leaves come out, and sap drips into them from the sap-wood just below the bark where it runs on sunny days. The sugar house has a tank on the side where sap is stored and runs into the wood-fired pans inside. The house is vented to let out all the steam as the sap has the water boiled out of it. As the water goes, the sugar content of the sap rises until it becomes syrup.

Check out the following video to learn more!