2025 Maple Syrup Season by the Numbers

We’ve wrapped up the 2025 maple syrup season (except for clean up, which isn’t the fun part!), and it’s always interesting to look at the numbers - start and end to the season, amount of sap, sap sugar content, and amount of syrup.

We tapped the first trees on March 5th and finished tapping on March 9th with about 1,400 taps of our own (in 3 different sugarbushes). This is the most taps we’ve put in (except for in 1987, but that’s another story). Our first batch of syrup was made on March 10th. The last sap was collected, taps were pulled, and the final batch of maple syrup was made on April 13th. So, our season was about 5 1/2 weeks long, which is what we’d consider in the range of an expected or typical year.

During the season, we made 1,290 gallons of syrup. This was by far our most productive syrup year. To make that syrup, we processed nearly 47,000 gallons of sap! Now some fun with math… it took about 36.5 gallons of sap to make each gallon of syrup, which means we averaged about 2.75% sugar content in the sap. For comparison, last year we processed about 45,000 gallons of sap, but the average sugar content was about 2.3% (about 43 gallons of sap/gallon of syrup).

Sugar content in the sap varies by sugarbush and throughout the year (and by year). Individual loads of sap this year ranged from 2.0 to 4.0% sugar (the 4% was on a cold morning when the ice was removed from the sap, resulting in higher concentrated sap). And, across the sugarbushes, sugar content for the season averaged from 2.3-3.0% sugar.

Of the sap we processed, 25,500 gallons came from neighboring sugarbushes that we purchased and 21,500 came from the trees we tapped. Those 21,500 gallons were all collected by human power in buckets and transported to the collecting tank pulled by a tractor. That means our crew carried 172,000 pounds (86 tons) of sap during the season. That’s some good muscle and good shared, collective work!

One last set of numbers: 21,500 gallons of sap from our 1,400 taps equals about 15 gallons of sap and resulting 0.4 gallons of syrup from each tap. That’s pretty good for buckets. Generally, 10 gallons of sap, the equivalent of about a quart of maple syrup, is considered average for this type of set up (relying just on the trees - not vacuum on lines). For comparison, last year we averaged about 20 gallons of sap and 0.46 gallons of syrup from each tap (more volume, but lower sugar content last year, which was an exceptional year).

Overall, it was a good year. Temperatures for the most part remained moderate which kept sap quality good. Syrup quality and flavor were pretty consistent throughout the season.

Now, it’s time to finish cleaning up, start getting ready for next season, and hope that the trees have a good summer of health and photosynthesis!