This week we’re going to pack another three barrels of maple syrup – about 165 gallons. This will last us into the beginning of the holiday season, when lots of folks buy maple syrup. We like to pack every quarter or so, so that our maple syrup stays very fresh in the containers. We’ve had [...]

Buidling on our [keg concept] from some months ago, Ellie and I installed a system the new counter top that sits on our dishwasher. For less than $50, we purchased the hardware needed to have a professional draft beer tap hooked into a 13 gallon keg of maple syrup sitting under our sink. Pressured up [...]

It all started out, as so many things do, with a clever plan. I did not then anticipate that I would later be rushing up I-93 to get to a formal event while covered in 18-month old beer. Such is maple syrup entrepreneurialism.
The problem that needed to get solved was transportation and dispensing of maple [...]

We took down the old greenhouse where we used to keep our main sap tank and its vacuum system, replacing it with the “sap barn,” a two-story affair that Robert and the boys put up in a few weeks over the summer. The barn itself is nice enough, but there are a couple special features [...]

We’ve made some pretty thick batches of maple syrup. This is probably the largest sugar crystal-to-maple-syrup-volume ratio I’ve seen in one of our bottles. This is a 500 ml bottle, with a rock sugar crystal at the bottom that might be more than 5 percent of the original volume of the maple syrup. It was [...]

We packed some of our Grade A Dark Amber maple syrup into our square bottles a few nights ago. We pack it strong. They were left overnight on the cold concrete floor, as temperatures dipped pretty low. The maple syrup at that temperature can keep only so much sugar in solution, so some of it [...]

We tend to make our maple syrup overstrength, ranging from 70 percent solids to 72 percent solids, about two to four percent higher than Vermont recommends. We just like it that way, even though some sugar comes out of solution in the form of crystals over time. When consumed before that happens, though, the extra [...]

There is an art to sending maple syrup, especially if you’re sending a large volume, and extra especially if you want to spend less on shipping than you do on making syrup. Decisions early in the process – such as which bottle shapes you use, and which sizes you offer customers – come to have [...]

After reading data from the a wide variety of overlapping sources, I made a stab at predicting the average price of syrup for 2009. You can skip the rest of this if you’re looking for the dollar figure. That’s $3.16 per pound, or $36 per gallon in 2009. I know that will disappoint many producers [...]

Different states will have slightly different terms sometimes, but syrup grade systems are essentially the same: they all are based solely on the color of the syrup, and the lighter the syrup the “higher” the grade. In Vermont, the grades start at Grade A Fancy and move on, in order, to Grade A Medium Amber, [...]