The Craft of Sugaring & Making Maple Syrup
Collecting sap from sugar maples and boiling it down to concentrate the sugar content is a late winter tradition that pre-dates recorded history. Native Americans introduced the practice to early European settlers, who immediately refined the process by introducing iron boiling kettles. This was a dramatic improvement over the native process of dropping hot rocks into sap held in thick wooden bowls.
The syrup & sugar produced from maple sap was indispensable as a nutritious food source that would not spoil and could be used for preserving other foods as well. It was as valuable as honey and was actually a form of currency in early North America.
Perhaps the most enduring image of “sugaring” features a horse-drawn sleigh working through a “sugar-bush” of maples with wooden sap buckets suspended on the tree-trunks and workers diligently carrying each bucket to the sleigh’s collection barrel, being careful not to spill a single drop of the precious liquid as they empty each bucket into the barrel.
Despite the deliciousness of maple syrup, the process of making a product (that actually only removes something... nothing is added to it!) is quite simple but is most certainly an art form. Learn about how Moon Valley Maple goes from sap to syrup!
1. Getting the Sap
What was once a tedious (albeit romantic) process, gathering syrup in metal buckets affixed to each tree, collecting sap has grown into a highly-efficient, streamlined process with many modern advancements. During the late months of winter, our sap workers trek throughout the forests of Titus Mountain, drilling holes in Maple trees and gently hammering a tap into it. Depending on its' size, a single tree can support 1-3 taps.
Instead of dripping the sap into buckets, modern sugaring operations connect taps to each other with sap lines that run down the mountain into a collection tank. As Moon Valley Maple is located on a mountain, gravity aides the movement of the sap from top to bottom although we also use a vacuum to suck the sap from the trees, running it through many lines, and finally landing in one of two collection tanks.
Cold nights and warm days create sap super-producers! We can get up to 1500 gallons an hour in our collection tanks! Once the tanks are full, we move the sap from the collection houses to our sugar house where it's ready to be boiled and made into delicious sap!
2. Making Syrup from Sap
It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup and we produce over 4000 gallons of syrup a year! That means each year we can turn about 160,000 gallons of sap into syrup all thanks to our state-of-the-art sugaring process!
Once maple sap has been collected from the trees and brought up to the sugar house we start the process of removing the water from the sap and boiling it down to become a concentrated, delicious, amber-colored confectionery delight! We start the process using our "Reverse Osmosis" machine. This machine uses pumps to filter the sap into a more concentrated version of itself by, in a nutshell, separating the sugar molecules from the water molecules.
Once the sap has run its course in the reverse osmosis machine, it's time to boil! The more concentrated sap will be boiled not unlike we boil water in a kitchen but with a much more delicious outcome. Our evaporator takes the sap and quickly boils it in the first step; the water escapes the sap through steam which leaves the sugary goodness (which is starting to look much more like maple syrup now) to continue boiling in a second, much more controlled step.
Throughout the boiling process, our sap workers continually check the density of the syrup to make sure that our product is the finest that it can be. As sap is finished boiling in the evaporator it runs into another collection tank in spurts. Each time the hose fills the tank we are checking for consistent density to make sure that the boiling process is perfect each time. The sap that is in this final tank is now officially syrup!
3. Getting the Syrup to You!
Once the density tank is full, it's now time to bottle our product to send out to the masses! A hose is hooked up between the syrup collection tank and our bottling machine. Here is it kept at a steady, warm temperature to ensure consistent bottling from beginning to end. We hand bottle every single jug of our syrup. Depending on needs we can fill any of our glass collector's bottles to plastic jugs to 55 gallon drums! We turn on the machine and start filling each bottle until a little wire tells us that there is enough in each container. We then take another container and fill that one, over and over again until we have used all of the syrup from the current boil.
There are many different ways to get our syrup once it has been bottled. Syrup that is used in our winter restaurants leaves the sugar house and heads right down to our kitchens while syrup set for retail is bottled and held in our warehouse. Local retailers get syrup hand delivered and our long-distance retailers receive shipments via USPS as needed.
The last step is cleaning! This is done after every single boil. Every time we have enough sap to start a boil the process goes from beginning to end without ever stopping. Once we have used the last of the sap that boil is finished and every piece of equipment is cleaned and sanitized. We take a tiny bit of sap and put it in a glass jar and log the grade of syrup after each boil. That completes the process until it's time for our next boil!
The syrup & sugar produced from maple sap was indispensable as a nutritious food source that would not spoil and could be used for preserving other foods as well. It was as valuable as honey and was actually a form of currency in early North America.
Perhaps the most enduring image of “sugaring” features a horse-drawn sleigh working through a “sugar-bush” of maples with wooden sap buckets suspended on the tree-trunks and workers diligently carrying each bucket to the sleigh’s collection barrel, being careful not to spill a single drop of the precious liquid as they empty each bucket into the barrel.
Despite the deliciousness of maple syrup, the process of making a product (that actually only removes something... nothing is added to it!) is quite simple but is most certainly an art form. Learn about how Moon Valley Maple goes from sap to syrup!
1. Getting the Sap
What was once a tedious (albeit romantic) process, gathering syrup in metal buckets affixed to each tree, collecting sap has grown into a highly-efficient, streamlined process with many modern advancements. During the late months of winter, our sap workers trek throughout the forests of Titus Mountain, drilling holes in Maple trees and gently hammering a tap into it. Depending on its' size, a single tree can support 1-3 taps.
Instead of dripping the sap into buckets, modern sugaring operations connect taps to each other with sap lines that run down the mountain into a collection tank. As Moon Valley Maple is located on a mountain, gravity aides the movement of the sap from top to bottom although we also use a vacuum to suck the sap from the trees, running it through many lines, and finally landing in one of two collection tanks.
Cold nights and warm days create sap super-producers! We can get up to 1500 gallons an hour in our collection tanks! Once the tanks are full, we move the sap from the collection houses to our sugar house where it's ready to be boiled and made into delicious sap!
2. Making Syrup from Sap
It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup and we produce over 4000 gallons of syrup a year! That means each year we can turn about 160,000 gallons of sap into syrup all thanks to our state-of-the-art sugaring process!
Once maple sap has been collected from the trees and brought up to the sugar house we start the process of removing the water from the sap and boiling it down to become a concentrated, delicious, amber-colored confectionery delight! We start the process using our "Reverse Osmosis" machine. This machine uses pumps to filter the sap into a more concentrated version of itself by, in a nutshell, separating the sugar molecules from the water molecules.
Once the sap has run its course in the reverse osmosis machine, it's time to boil! The more concentrated sap will be boiled not unlike we boil water in a kitchen but with a much more delicious outcome. Our evaporator takes the sap and quickly boils it in the first step; the water escapes the sap through steam which leaves the sugary goodness (which is starting to look much more like maple syrup now) to continue boiling in a second, much more controlled step.
Throughout the boiling process, our sap workers continually check the density of the syrup to make sure that our product is the finest that it can be. As sap is finished boiling in the evaporator it runs into another collection tank in spurts. Each time the hose fills the tank we are checking for consistent density to make sure that the boiling process is perfect each time. The sap that is in this final tank is now officially syrup!
3. Getting the Syrup to You!
Once the density tank is full, it's now time to bottle our product to send out to the masses! A hose is hooked up between the syrup collection tank and our bottling machine. Here is it kept at a steady, warm temperature to ensure consistent bottling from beginning to end. We hand bottle every single jug of our syrup. Depending on needs we can fill any of our glass collector's bottles to plastic jugs to 55 gallon drums! We turn on the machine and start filling each bottle until a little wire tells us that there is enough in each container. We then take another container and fill that one, over and over again until we have used all of the syrup from the current boil.
There are many different ways to get our syrup once it has been bottled. Syrup that is used in our winter restaurants leaves the sugar house and heads right down to our kitchens while syrup set for retail is bottled and held in our warehouse. Local retailers get syrup hand delivered and our long-distance retailers receive shipments via USPS as needed.
The last step is cleaning! This is done after every single boil. Every time we have enough sap to start a boil the process goes from beginning to end without ever stopping. Once we have used the last of the sap that boil is finished and every piece of equipment is cleaned and sanitized. We take a tiny bit of sap and put it in a glass jar and log the grade of syrup after each boil. That completes the process until it's time for our next boil!
