Wednesday, April 25, 2012

How to Make Maple Syrup

It has been an unusual season, so far…almost no snow, and the bare ground hardly frozen. We don’t see this as a good sign. The sap flow started much earlier than normal, and we did not finish collecting sap before the end of March. Usually we have cooperative weather (freezing nights and warm days) well into April. By the end of this April we were all done packing, and had removed all taps, buckets, and equipment from the sugarbush. We like to do that well before the onset of black-flies. They are pesky little critters that herald spring in our northern climate, along with the spring peepers. (Pesky may be a timid way to describe how bothersome they can be). Some people actually break out in welts from their bite, which is not soothed by the gentle melodies of the tiny frogs called peepers.

 There have been extreme temperature fluctuations thus far, which have led to very strong sap runs, so we expect a reasonably good season. Some sugar-makers to the south of us have already curtailed operations. Global warming is not doing any of us any good.

 Concentrating sap into syrup over hot pans is as much art as science. It is delicate (at times boring; watching sap boil is not stimulating), and can be panic inducing. The large boiling pans are stainless steel, very expensive, and can be totally ruined in a flash, if burned. Thus, the temperature, consistency, and especially the depth of the boiling liquid are constantly monitored.

 The resulting steam is vented out of the cupola in our sugarhouse. After the fire is set we get a rolling boil -huge clouds of steam form. Some of that steam is captured and condensed in a pre-heater, taking cold 30-40° ambient sap temperature and warming it to about 190° before it travels into the flue pan (a corrugated pan designed for maximum surface exposure to the fire underneath).

The pre-heater is a blessing. It gives us copious amounts of distilled hot water, much of which we use to keep the operations clean, and, in particular, to wash cloth filters used in straining the finished syrup. Maple syrup in its raw state contains malate of nitre (called sugar-sand as it is gritty). This is a totally harmless by-product that is removed by filtering to make the syrup clearer. All that distilled hot water makes for a very relaxing and comfortable dip in the large cedar bathtub at the end of a hard day’s work!

Cruising the sugarbush on an early February morning it was clear that we were in the midst of a good sap run…”two to three to a heart beat”… an expression used by old-time sugarmakers to describe how fast sap flows. At that rate, a 3-gallon capacity bucket will fill in a day, or a long afternoon. The symphony of pings as raw sap drips into empty buckets is music to our ears, especially when it blends with the cry of songbirds and woodpeckers beating bass notes on hollow logs. It also tells you it’s time to gather sap, and we did that from buckets that were nearly full by sundown…making the process very productive.

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