By BECKY NELSON
March is New Hampshire Maple Month, with a weekend in the middle celebrated as New Hampshire Maple Weekend. Sugarhouses are open, sap (or water if no run) is being boiled, donuts are consumed, and the general public gets a chance to see how maple syrup is made.
A lot has changed in a very short span of a half century in the maple industry. Just like other branches of agriculture and forestry, there has been a shift from the couple-hundred-tap operations that gathered buckets and cooked down the goods in a shack built to keep the wind and rain off. The results were only a few gallons at best.
The first step in the maple syrup process is to have maple trees. There are great debates of whether to tap red maple or only “rock” maple, but despite a small difference of sugar content in the sap, a maple is a maple. We liken the process of tapping the tree to donating blood. A small hole is drilled, a spout or spile is inserted in the hole, and sap is gathered. Everything was done with buckets in the past, and backyard sugarmakers still use buckets, but those of us trying to earn a living producing maple syrup have come a long way into the technology world.
If you were to visit our sugar orchard, you would see miles and miles of plastic tubing strung through the hillsides. Each hole in a tree is connected to a specialized spout with a check valve to keep sap from backing up into the trees. This helps tree health as less bacteria can enter the system and create any problems or premature drying of the tap holes. The sap, which flows when days are warm and nights are below freezing, pulls starches from the tree roots and converts them to energy-producing sugars that spur leaf growth. We collect those sugary waters with the help of a sophisticated vacuum system, boil the water away and are left with the most delightful sugar mixture I can think of.
Whether in a bucket or flowing through those miles of tubing into water-pipe “main lines” to a holding tank, the sap needs to be converted to syrup. We, and most other medium-or large-scale producers, then process the sap through reverse-osmosis. This is a machine with massive filters that helps separate the water from the sugars and reduce the labor and fuel necessary to boil it all away. The reduction of water is pretty significant. Maple syrup is 66% sugar. Sap is usually about 2% sugar. Reverse osmosis increases the sugar content of the sap to (in our case) about 8% sugar, which reduces the time we have to keep the liquid in the boiling pans significantly. The reduction in labor is tremendous…and as we age, a blessing beyond measure. What would take us a couple of days of round-the-clock boiling is now accomplished in about 8 hours. It’s amazing and leads to a much better quality of life for us old folks.
Though the majority of larger producers now fuel their maple production fires with oil, gas or wood pellets, we use the waste wood from forest maintenance in a traditional wood-fired system. We have advanced on the technology scale, but it just makes sense to use the fuel we have.
Once the syrup is made, many producers run the syrup through a pressurized filter to remove any debris (we still use a simplified cloth and paper filter system) and either jug the syrup or store it in drums to be reheated and jugged into retail containers later. It’s a lot of work. It takes a tremendous number of man-hours to maintain the tubing and mainlines in the woods, tap the trees, maintain the sugarhouse and maple equipment and boil the sap during the very short window of a few weeks when the trees are sending sugars to their branches.
Experts think the maple tree will decline in New England over the next several decades as the climate warms. That may very well be so, but for now we intend to keep on making the liquid gold, and are even adding a few taps every year. I am glad we don’t have to go out and gather buckets of sap to do it and then boil it in the open air like my predecessors, though. Technology and science are wonderful.
Though our sugarhouse is not open for public tours any more as the process has sped up and the labor force around the farm has shrunk, there are many other fellow maple producers around that invite visitors to enjoy the process. Visit nhmapleproducers.com for a partial list of these sugarhouses and enjoy this quintessential spring process.
Becky Nelson is co-owner of Beaver Pond Farm in Newport, New Hampshire. [email protected].
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