This is now the third year that I have tried to harvest sap from the tree in front of our house in the middle of the City Of Saint Louis, and I finally had a tiny bit of success. Like, one quarter cup of success. We installed a sap tap on two different maple trees yesterday (Saturday, January 25th, 2025) and by today (Sunday, January 26th, 2025) had harvested 8 cups of sap. I cooked that down to about one quarter cup of maple syrup, which sure looks like almost nothing. After cooking the sap down to syrup it seemed like there was too much maple syrup still clinging to the pan so I decided to make good use of that by warming milk in that pan, which dissolved the syrup that had been solidified onto the pan, and that worked very well. Added cocoa powder and a quarter teaspoon of vanilla and I had a cup of hot chocolate, sweetened by syrup that had come out of a tree that same day. Kinda cool.