We went to a maple syrup farm called Silloway Maple. www.sillowaymaple.com
Bette took us on a tour of how maple goes from tree sap to maple syrup and even maple sugar.
In January, all the maple farms and most people with a few sugar maples go out into the woods and tap all maple trees over 17" in diameter. If you only have a few trees, you use the old bucket method. If you have more than a few trees, you go with the tubing method. They drill a small hole in the tree and insert a small tap that has a tube connector. They run the 1/4" tube downhill to a central collection tank. From there, they pump the sap through 1" tubes to the boil house.
That's Bette from the farm showing us the tap holes in the tree and the tube is connected to a tap. Only 1 tap per tree.
The sap has 1% to 2% sugar content. This year was a short but productive year, with a lot of sap but the sap only had 1% sugar content. The less sugar means more boiling.
The tubes from all the trees meet in the woods and fill up a large tank.
Once enough sap collects at the tank they pump it to the boil house. Again all through tubes run through the woods. They spend most of January and February walking through the snow in the woods running miles and miles of tubes. This particular maple farm has 21,000 trees tapped.
Here is all the main feeder tubes running to the boil house.
That's the sap tubes running up above Jan and Bette. There it collects in that big, shiny tank you see right there.
Now it's ready for processing. First it goes through a reverse osmosis filter to remove as much water as they can. Less water in the sap means less boiling time. The water is saved and used in later processing. Then it's ready for boiling. Here is the boiling machine. It's wood fired and they got through a whole lot of wood in February and March.
They boil the sap until it goes from 1% sugar to 66% sugar. Finally, they filter it and bottle it (or keg it for later in the year processing).
They have different colors of syrup. It goes from golden to very brown. The difference is when the sap is harvested. The earlier the sap runs, the lighter (and less maple taste) the syrup is. This has to do with microbes in the trees. As the weather (and trees) warm up, the microbes get busier. The more microbes there are, the sap gets tastier and darker.
We had taste samples of all four official color grades. Golden has the least maple taste, but a lot of people like it. Amber is a little darker and tastier. This is the most common pancake syrup. Next is dark. I liked this one the best. I bought a bottle of this for pancakes and for beer brewing. Finally, there is darker. This is mostly used for cooking.
Syrup is only the first product made. They also make maple cream and maple sugar.
Maple cream is kind of like maple butter (only with no fat). They take some syrup and start boiling it until it gets thick and is about 240º (soft ball stage). At this point it turns from dark brown to almost white. They take if off the heat and start whipping it. That's it, just maple syrup boiled and whipped. It has the consistency of peanut butter and is very smooth, like frosting. That's how they mostly use it, frosting donuts and other things. Jan knows how to make donuts in the air fryer so next time, we will frost them with maple cream instead of dusting with sugar and cinnamon.
The other product they make is maple sugar. This time they boil the syrup longer. Next, they let it sit until it gets to room temperature. Once it gets cool enough, they put it in a commercial mixer and start mixing. At some point, it just breaks down into a power. She says it's like magic, and goes from sticky taffy to granulated sugar almost instantly. And now you have maple sugar.
I bought a maple sugar rub for cooking. We put it on some salmon tonight and it was great.
All the maple pictures and more are on the Vermont photo page. Go take a look.
We leave Vermont tomorrow and go to Poland, New York. That will be another short stay, only 2 nights. After that we go to Niagra Falls.
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