While there is a very strong localvore movement here in Vermont, we can protect a lot more forest by selling to export markets than we can by selling in the farmers markets.

In the export market, the big competition is the Canadians, who spend quite a bit of money marketing their syrup worldwide, largely as a single trading cooperative. Their marketing can sometimes sound as though they are talking down the maple syrup produced in the U.S. Speaking to several prospective Asian clients over the last year, as I have, you definitely get the impression that they’re being told frequently about the “unique” qualities of Canadian syrup.

I figure the best answer to that is sending barrels of maple syrup overseas so that people can see for themselves. We produced a brochure for international clients that can be seen here.

In South Korea, there has long been a market for maple sap, rather than maple syrup. They call the sap gorosoe. Sap, however, is impractical to transport half-way across the world, as it requires storage systems similar to those required by milk. Once it’s concentrated into maple syrup, it is sufficiently stable to ship. Reconstituting sap from syrup (adding water) can be done, but it will contain the diluted maple flavor of maple syrup. Uncooked sap does not.

Nancy’s granola manages to retain a lot of maple flavor. She uses our dark commercial syrup that really packs a punch. She sent samples to us of different mixes and production methods, and after a few months of consulting wound up with this particular recipe. I highly recommend people try it. Nancy’s site isn’t up yet, but she can be emailed at nancysgranola-at-yahoo.com.

I used up the last bit with an experiment; pouring milk into a small cup of the granola and using it as a cereal.

It goes to show that there is room in the food market for people who have a passion for tinkering in the kitchen to discover new ways of doing things that set their product on a higher level than anything else out there. Elaine McCabe’s Red Kite Candies also comes to mind, the company that created a new kind of caramel that is so much better than normal caramels, that they should really be called something different. In both cases, the women were relentless about systematically testing different options and methods.

To be filled with maple syrup barrels

Bruce was kind to take me through his new 45,000 square foot maple syrup warehouse facility, just about to come online. A lot of thought went into the design. Bruce is one of the people in the maple syrup business who sells enough and to sufficiently-sensitive food companies so as to have a lot of regulatory scrutiny on his operation. Some of the details in his warehouse may portend changes that will likely ripple through the maple syrup industry, for people selling maple at scale.

Bruce has an 18 inch curb around all internal sides of the buildings, for instance, to provide inspector access behind piles of full barrels. The receiving, storing and packing rooms are put in a certain fashion so that there can be a graduated set of cleanliness standards. In all, he mentioned a couple dozen items that most maple syrup makers will not think to design into a new facility until they’ve done it once or twice and had the food police come and look for trouble.

This new scrutiny, which is not a bad thing all around, might be a bit overkill for maple syrup, which isn’t as dangerous a product as, say, pork. Making forklift drivers in a maple syrup barrel warehouse wear hairnets, for instance, might be entertaining, but isn’t improving our food security. All that said, it’s coming our way, and it will likely be the sort of expensive compliance process that will drive the maple syrup business into farm gate producers versus big packers who can afford a 45,000 square foot maple syrup warehouse. This may prove to be a shift as significant as the dairy industry saw when they forced farmers to build milk houses in the early part of last century.

Moving Maple Syrup Barrels

This’ll be a two-day process of refiltering the maple syrup, heating it up in the finishing pan and transferring it in batches into our packing unit. We’ll be dealing with three different maple syrup grades from three different barrels, putting it into containers ranging from five gallons to 50 ml maple leafs. That should set us up to be ready for demand in the next few months, as we expect to have less time available with the coming baby.

Building on our maple syrup 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 bulk maple syrup sitting under our sink. Pressured up to 500 pounds per square inch, this guy will give us a year’s supply of maple syrup on demand.

We designed this originally for some of our small- and medium-scaled food manufacturer clients – folks like Ola Granola and Red Kite Candies, who use a significant amount of our maple syrup for their yummy products, and find it difficult to handle large barrels in their kitchen facilities. It turned out, though, that while the flow of maple syrup is fine for personal use, it’s too slow for efficient application when drawing a few cups at a time. But now we’re getting interest from folks looking to install a draft maple syrup system in their own kitchens. Nothing Vermontier than maple syrup on tap.

The problem that needed to get solved was transportation and dispensing of maple syrup to increasingly large bulk maple syrup customers. Once every couple months, I make the rounds in New England, delivering barrels of maple syrup to some very interesting – sometimes innovative – whole sale customers using maple syrup for everything from granola manufacturing to restaurant use to wedding favors, corporate gifts, all the way to theatrical blood simulation. A lot of these businesses have similar issues about storing wholesale maple syrup and using it in their various batch sizes, all the while trying to prevent it from spoiling, crystalizing, etc. Besides, open topped barrels are just plan sticky.

As with our bottles, boxes and other elements, I’ve discovered that borrowing items from other related industries creates a much better economy of scale than purchasing items designed specifically for maple syrup. For instance, our liter bottles of maple syrup fit into wine shippers that cost about one third as much as the equivalent box for the more obscure maple syrup container shapes.

Thus, I came up with the keg scheme for bulk maple syrup. They’re interchangeable, common, and have their own flourishing aftermarket of related products for moving, cleaning and doing pretty much anything to kegs.

The first thing I discovered when I hopped online to learn where to get one for experimentation, was that breweries own their own kegs, and it’s actually quite difficult to come by them. Only when I discovered a brewery going out of business did I get a chance to snag some.

On my way back up from one of these treks across New England, carrying my wholesale maple syrup rounds, I stopped last at the brewery in southern New Hampshire and picked them up. There, a nice young fellow showed me how to open them up and remove the mechanism in the middle that allows for dispensing and pressurization. What he didn’t realize was that the keg he was using as an example happened to have been sitting in the summer sun for a few months with the dregs of a soured stout. When he pushed in the spring-loaded ball, out shot a vile stream of beer-turned-vinegar, splashing all over us. I had 90 minutes to be back up in Vermont for an event, and I didn’t have a change of clothes.

Since then, though, the bulk maple syrup keg idea has taken on some steam. After acquiring some compressed gas tanks and various fittings, we have maple syrup dispensing out of some test kegs, and even have our first household client, who wishes to stick a keg under the sink and have a maple syrup tap on the kitchen counter. Because we’re using nitrogen to replace the air inside as it dispenses, aerobic bacteria cannot grow. Pretty clever, those beer-drinking people.

After a couple more weeks of testing, we’ll be confident that the mechanism won’t get gummed up with our maple syrup, which is just a bit thicker than most. After we do some refrigeration tests and carbonation tests, we’ll green-light the bulk maple syrup kegs to send on to a couple of our business clients.

In particular, we bolted on an I-beam just under the ridge beam, allowing a wheeled trolley to slide back and forth with very heavy loads. You can see from the picture on the right that we made the beam pop out the second story doors, allowing us to hoist loads from trucks below.

And given that our 55 gallon barrels of maple syrup weigh about 650 pounds, we added a surprisingly cheap winch crane to attach to the trolley. If this contraption doesn’t kill one of us, it’ll be very handy. Most of our bulk maple syrup, intended for wholesale use, will be hoisted up into this second story for storage over the year.

Once the barrels make it through the doorway, we can drop them onto dollies and push them around. To accommodate this, the floor system up there was built 12-inch-on-center, with heftier stringers than you’d put in a residential structure.

Just because they felt like it, the boys opted to build the barn post-and-beam. Its a pretty old-timey structure, with about all of the design conforming to specific sugaring use. That seemed like a compromise at first, but it’s the more beautiful for it.

Robert and the boys have since thought they  might build these sorts of structures for other folks, seeing how smoothly this one went up. They went and created the site Vermont Cedar Cabins and have been doing some work in this line.

Meanwhile, back at the barn, we need to get the 600 gallon sap tank installed up top. Lots of vacuum plumbing yet to be done. That tank will have a four-inch pipe coming out of it, where we can operate a big butterfly valve from below to start the sap filling up our utility vehicle tank for transport over to the sugar shack. This’ll be quite a tweaking process. It doesn’t take much time for a four-inch pipe of sap coming from 18 feet off the ground to get someone wet. Should be interesting.

I’ve set up a small finishing room in the back, and that’s been working out nicely. We’ll be able to get the barrels up stairs started with heating (purchased a used barrel warmer), and then pipe it on down to get to sterile temperatures for packing.

More typically, we see some very small crystals form in the bottom.

One element I’ve been thinking about: if we’re boiling down extra strong, the sugar content of that syrup is obviously higher than normal. A New Hampshire syrup might be below 68 percent sugar. A Vermont syrup should be just above 68 percent. We’ll pack it at about 70 or so. But when the sugar comes out of solution like this, folks say it’s just back to normal syrup. Except, I think it’s not. You see, those sugar crystals don’t taste like maple syrup. They’re just pure sugar. Which means that all the extra maple flavor associated with that volume of syrup remains in the bottle. Here is a picture of the same bottle in the evening…

[This is, quite literally, stored energy]

I need to test this more carefully, but I believe that a bottle of overstrength maple syrup that has been brought back to normal strength through sugar crystals forming will have a higher rate of maple syrup flavor than a bottle that was just brought to normal density in the first place. We could probably best test this with some Grade A Fancy, where the normal strength maple syrup lacks the strong flavor of the darker grades of maple syrup. Sounds like a great excuse to do another tasting.

Here is a picture of a maple syrup bottle consumed slowly over a year, leaving a residue of maple sugar crystals…

Interestingly, we’ve been polling people over the 2008 to see whether they prefer thicker, “normal” or thinner maple syrup. The vast majority of people said they preferred the standard thickness. One or two said thinner, and perhaps a quarter said thicker. This surprised me, as I assumed everyone would prefer thicker maple syrup over the norm.

When asked both if they knew their preferences well and whether they liked lighter or darker maple syrup, the folks who indicated they knew their preferences mostly said darker maple syrup, perhaps by a 2-1 ratio. The people who indicated that they weren’t confident in their preferences were more apt – but not by much – to say lighter maple syrup. This is consistent with studies done by maple research centers, although I have not seen them couch their questions with the information about how confident the respondents are in their various answers.

A before and after shot of the bottles of overstrength maple syrup.

The maple syrup bottles above are a recent gift to some in-laws, next to the bottle just recently finished off from last year’s gift. Some customers see the maple sugar crystals growing in glass containers and assume that it must be some sort of organic growth. I find that they express this concern particularly when maple sugar just starts to come out of solution, as the early crystals look an awful lot like a fuzz on the inside bottle surface, and sometimes floating just under the maple syrup’s surface.

I am not sure about this, but I suspect that overstrength maple syrup is less friendly to growths because of its lower than normal water ratio. Typically, growths in maple syrup happen only in the thin layer of water at the top of the bottle, often resulting from condensation.