My wife decided to give it a try this year too. We had about 12 buckets going and had 2 boil down days separated by about 2 weeks. We are very much beginners but we have about 8 pints of maple syrup to show for it. We cheated and used a commercial stove that our family uses for our big fall applesauce making shindig. I hated to see that beautiful 6 burner behemoth sit there the rest of the year in the basement so doing syrup on it was the logical way to make it work at least once in the spring and once in the fall. Keeping an even boil was easy with the stove. I can't even imagine keeping an even boil on a wood stove out in the woods
I think ours is a bit runny, probably we could have gone a little more but we didn't want maple candy instead of maple syrup.
Yours looks great DonoBBD and thanks for showing/teaching that the syrup can darken as the season extends. That may explain why our first batch which is the only jar we broke into and tasted was a bit on the light side without much sweetness.
