Making Maple
THE JOUNEY FROM TREE TO TABLE
Tapping Season Begins
When the weather gets cold, tapping can begin! With over 11,000 taps on 150+ acres, this is the busy start to our season. We do this in January and February, when it's the temperature sweet spot: below freezing (32 degrees), but ideally above 10 degrees.
We use a plastic spout that gets drilled into the tree, which our pipeline tubing gets hooked to. This allows the sap to flow directly to the sugar house or one of our pump houses, where we can transport it for processing.
Our woods have several miles of pipeline!
Sap Starts Running
Just like with tapping, sap requires juuuust the right weather. When the days are warm but it's still below freezing at night, sap will get the high sugar content we're looking for to make the syrup sweet.
We spend a fair amount of time in the woods when the sap is running to ensure the lines stay free of any downed trees and are safe from bad weather or animal disturbances. We call this "leak checking," and it makes all the difference in the amount of sap that we can collect!
When Sap Becomes Syrup
Once we gather the raw sap from the trees, we run it through a reverse osmosis system (RO) that pulls the water out of the sap and brings the sugar content up.
Once we have a concentrated product from the RO, we fire up the oil evaporator that we use to boil the sap into syrup.
The evaporator heats up the sap and, once it reaches a temperature of 211 degrees, we get our Organic Maple Syrup!
The final step before bottling the syrup is to push it through a filter press, which ensures all impurities are removed.
The Season Ends
After a busy March & April full of production, we have our reward! If the sugaring season went well, we can expect to produce over a hundred 44-gallon barrels of syrup ready to package and sell. It's time to clean the sugar house, pull taps from trees, and start thinking about next year!