Tapping

at the end of the deepest part of our winter, sap from thousands of trees flows from taps and tubing for collection. While it varies from year to year (dependent on temperatures), the taps usually need to be in before the first week of march.

if a sugar maple or a red maple is 10″ in diameter or larger, it gets tapped. wider than 16″ in diameter and it can receive two taps. Following these conservative tapping practices will ensure we are able to collect sap from these trees for years to come.

Collection

when the weather warms up and the days are above freezing, The aggregated sap runs from taps along the smaller tubing to progressively larger diameter tubing from the higher mountain elevations. Ultimately it arrives into the sugarhouse for processing. Collection usually occurs here until the beginning of may, and stops when the temperatures no longer reach freezing at night for about a week.

transformation

after collecting the raw sap, it is filtered a handful of times, then concentrated, and finally boiled on the evaporator. The boiling process caramelizes the natural sugars and blends the minerals in the sap to combine and make that wonderful maple flavor in syrup. when the syrup reaches the appropriate temperature and density, it is ‘drawn off’ the evaporator.

Filtering/Grading

As boils are completed, and syrup is gathered in stainless steel barrels, the syrup needs to be filtered again to collect all of the ‘sugar sand’ and ‘niter’ that precipitates in the syrup. niter a fine gritty material that is essentially super-concentrated amounts of natural minerals that are carried in the sap that collect together during boiling. ‘Sugar sand’ is minute sugar crystals that develop any time syrup is heated (or re-heated) near its boiling point. filtering both of these out enhances flavor and clarity of the syrup.

once filtered, the syrup is graded for light transmittance (color), and flavor.

Bottling/Labelling

batches are divided into their packaging cohorts and for syrup, ‘hot-packed’ into their containers. Hot-packing ensures two things:

• any microbes present in the syrup (or the containers) are killed by the heat
• as the syrup cools, the air-tight containers create a vacuum keeping syrup fresh and shelf-stable for a year or more.

grade and product labels are applied according to their cohort’s classification.

Clean-up and un-tappinG

while cleaning all of the surfaces that sap touches in the sugarhouse happens throughout the season, end-of-season cleaning encompasses everything: the lines, the equipment cleaning and maintenance, even to some extent, the trees. spouts are removed after the season and tap-wounds are able close and segment off a section of the tree’s stem.

Throughout the summer, fall, and winter the trees continue to grow, process chlorophyll, compose the starches and begin storing the sugars in preparation for the next season!