Getting started

What it costs to start

Updated October 2026

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The instrument comes first either way Concentrated: the evaporator dominates Formulated: the kitchen dominates The cost both of them forget Price it before you spend it Count the time, even if you are not paying it References

The two crafts have wildly different entry costs, and the cheapest item in both is the one that decides whether you have a product: the instrument that reads density.

The instrument comes first either way

A hydrometer and test cup, or a refractometer, is the smallest line on this list and the only one you genuinely cannot work without. Finishing a syrup by eye produces a product that is sometimes legal and sometimes not, and you will not know which bottle is which.

Concentrated: the evaporator dominates

An evaporator sized to your sap volume, which is the dominant cost and the one that sets your ceiling for years.
Filtering equipment, because the sediment is not optional to remove.
A finishing pan and a reliable heat source for the last few degrees.
Storage for raw material that cannot wait.

None of that is recoverable if you stop, which is the argument for one season on borrowed or shared equipment before buying.

Formulated: the kitchen dominates

Sugar, water, flavoring, a pot, a scale and somewhere legal to work. The cost is almost entirely the licensed space and the labels, and the equipment list is short enough that the real question is where you are allowed to make it rather than what you make it with.

The cost both of them forget

Bottles and closures bought in a quantity that makes sense. A case of bottles is cheap per unit and expensive as a line item, and the first order is usually made before the label is designed, which is how people end up with bottles whose panel will not take the label they wanted.

Price it before you spend it

Work out what a bottle has to sell for to cover all of the above at the volume you will actually make in the first year, not the one you are hoping for. That number is the honest test of whether the equipment list above is an investment or a hobby expense.

Count the time, even if you are not paying it

A long boil is mostly waiting, and waiting that is unpaid in year one is a cost you will have to pay somebody else for in year three. Costing a bottle with your own labor at zero produces a price that works only while you are the one standing at the pan, which is the version of this business that cannot grow.

References

United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Marketing Service. United States Standards for Grades of Maple Sirup (Syrup), adopted January 29, 2015 and effective March 15, 2015. Grade A is “not less than 66.0 nor more than 68.9 percent solids content by weight (Brix)” in four color classes measured as percent light transmittance. ams.usda.gov

21 CFR 168.140, Maple sirup: “contains not less than 66 percent by weight of soluble solids derived solely from such sap.” Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21. law.cornell.edu

Written from federal regulation, a state maple regulation and published extension guidance, not from a laboratory. The density figures quoted are standards of identity and grade, and your state may set its own above them. Anything here is a starting point for a conversation with your state department of agriculture, not a determination that you comply.