Hi fellow Travelers,
Today I'm here with some fun we had on a recent weekend trip: a maple syrup tour!
Maple Syrup Adventures
One of the things that is quintessential New England or northern climates with lower temperatures is consuming maple syrup! The liquid is delicious and full of awesome flavors but also some great things for our health like minerals. If you've ever had fresh, real maple syrup the colored sugar syrup at the store is something that tastes like garbage lol
We were looking for things to do and my wife stumbled upon the maple syrup tour that was recently starting up so we decided to check it out! We've known they do them but we never really got around to doing it, so we decided to check it out. It's the perfect time of year for "syruping" as they call it. When temperatures are below freezing or 32 degrees Fahrenheit / 0 Celsius, it's prime syrup weather.
When it's below freezing what the trees do is send sugar up to the various parts of the tree via the sap. This is to send food up while the sun isn't giving the tree any photosynthesis, being winter and all. The key with maple syrup and harvesting the sap, or maple water as it's also known, is to start doing it at the right time. If you do it too early it won't "run" down the lines, mainly because the sap is frozen solid in the tree or line! (Picture below is what's called a "main line" where a bunch of smaller lines all connect and run for hundreds or thousands of feet into the bigger one)
The place we visited, called Ben's Sugar Shack, taps about 30,000 trees to make the maple syrup! They started the process in January where the staff members that work for him that are the "tree crew" go out into the woods and start to tap the trees. It takes them 3 months to tap and check all of the lines to make sure they are working and not broken. The tree crew has to constantly, every day, especially during sugar season, go out and check all of the junctions and lines. Any junction that isn't giving the proper pressure means that there's either a fallen tree limb that broke or disconnected the line or the squirrels chewed through the line and they have to fix it. In the last week alone they had to fix 1,000 feet of tubing! I think they said that they have 50 miles of tubing in total that touch all the trees, and then connect at the various hubs.
Seen below is the pump that keeps the pressure on the main lines. The smaller tank keeps the pressure up on the lines and sucks the liquid in. Once that upper tank fills up, it goes down to the larger tank to keep the pressure gradient up. They ideally want > 25 pressure on the line (don't know if it's mm/hg or psi, didn't catch that) to keep the stuff flowing. If it dips below that they know there's an issue on the lines somewhere and they have to find out where it is.
Once the middle tank fills up, it then flows into the bottom black tub until it gets to a certain level. Once it hits a certain level it's then pumped out by a water pump and pushed into a giant holding tank. They have 6 1,000 gallon holding tanks spread throughout their property, with this being the first one.
Once the holding tanks are filled to a certain point, a pump truck goes around and empties the tanks periodically throughout the day depending on the weather and other factors that help with the flow of the sap. The pump truck then empties all of the liquid into this massive 10,000 gallon holding tank! This tank here is never full because if it's full or near full that means the syrup making machine isn't working and that's not good.
One of the things I knew a little bit about but not as much as I thought, was how much maple sap it takes to make syrup! The normal amount of sap:syrup ratio is 40:1 meaning 40 gallons of maple sap makes 1 gallon of syrup. That's a whole hell of a lot of sap! That's why maple syrup is always fairly expensive because it takes a considerable amount of effort and resources to produce one gallon of it.
What I also found interesting is that they use reverse osmosis to pull out as much water as they can to condense the maple sap into more sugar versus water. When they use reverse osmosis, it cuts down the sap to syrup ratio from 40 gallons down to about 6 I think they said. That's 34 gallons of water that they don't need to boil which saves a considerable amount of time and especially energy.
Seen below you can see all the steam that's produced! It was wild for sure. Made the room smell great though lol The guy giving the tour is Ben himself!
This is the giant machine that they use to boil the water to get rid of the liquid and leave the delicious syrup at the end. It takes 25 gallons of oil per hour to run the machine and especially with fuel prices what they are right now, that's a considerable cost to make syrup!
It was an awesome trip to watch how the syrup was made. This guy has been making and selling maple syrup for almost 30 years! He got into it as a hobby from learning about it through his family, who have been making their own homemade syrup for 5 generations. He got a small machine in I believe he said 4th or 5th grade as a Christmas present and started making it and selling it. He now employs 25 people full time all year to make the syrup, bottle it, deliver it, work the gift shop and everything else it takes to run a business. This was the very definition of small business! I felt great that we went to visit them but that we also purchase some stuff from them to help support their local small business. These are the businesses that the world desperately needs more of and to keep alive. We absolutely do not need more Walmart and Amazon companies!
Hope you enjoyed the adventure we had here! I certainly enjoyed the educational aspect of it and was really glad to have made it into a family trip, one that helps educate our son on the importance of many things but especially what can be done right in our own neighborhoods!
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