The area's largest
pure NH maple syrup display
314 Route 4
Barrington, NH
1-800-57-MAPLE
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How is Maple Syrup Made?
To make maple syrup, you essentially gather sap (a clear liquid which circulates in the tree) from a maple tree and boil it so that the water evaporates but the sugar stays in the sap. Once the sap reaches a certain sugar content (approximately 67%), it is syrup!
There is no set time when the sap is gathered and boiled, although it is around late winter/early spring. We "tap" our trees with a spout, and the sap is collected either in a bucket or with a plastic tubing system. Only healthy, older trees are tapped. A maple tree must be at least 10 inches in diameter (which is about 40 years old!) and in good health before it is tapped. If these "rules" are used, tapping will not harm the tree and the tree can produce sap for a hundred years or more.
Soon the sap starts to flow.
This usually occurs when there are
freezing nights and warm days. Long warm periods or cold snaps can stop
the flow of sap, but it will continue again when the conditions are right.
When the sap is flowing, we must evaporate it as soon as possible because the
freshest sap makes the best quality syrup. So we must gather and boil the
sap quickly. We collect sap from buckets with large pails, and empty them
into a large gathering tank mounted on a truck. Or, in the case of plastic
tubing, several trees are joined together with the tubing, which runs into a
"mainline", which runs downhill to a storage tank and we collect the
sap from that .
The sap is brought to our
"sugarhouse" to be made into syrup. Sugarhouses have a vent at
the top to allow for escaping steam as the sap evaporates. Our evaporator
is powered
by wood, and during March, we've even had the fire department called on us
because of all the steam escaping through the top of the sugarhouse! The
evaporator looks a lot like a huge woodstove. When we're boiling sap, the fire
must be kept up constantly with the wood we've gathered throughout the
year. Above the fire, there is a series of evaporator pans, where the sap
flows constantly through. When the liquid in the pans reaches a
temperature of 219 degrees, it has become maple syrup. It takes about 40
gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup!
Once
the syrup is ready, a valve is opened on the evaporator and the syrup is
collected, filtered and bottled. You now have maple syrup for your
pancakes!
But we're not done yet. Once the sugaring season is over (the whole season takes anywhere from 3-8 weeks), all the equipment needs to be cleaned and put away neatly for next season.
