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 [...]

Retailers across the country have priced maple syrup higher than what government sources report. This year it became pretty clear that the maple syrup pricing reports don’t square with what we see in stores, so we went out and collected our own data set. One key difference between this and what a group like the [...]

Today the guys and I went out to Enfield, NH to haul back an old 3′ by 10′ evaporator to replace our tiny 2′ by 5.5′ unit that served us the past couple few years. While the little unit should have been enough for what we were doing, it turned out to be less efficient [...]

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 [...]

This overview shows how people take the fluid in the veins of trees and concentrate it to make maple syrup. You can search this site for more specific articles on each aspect, but here it is briefly all in one place.
For some unknown reason, sugar maple trees produce much, much more sap and much sweeter [...]

Nothing beats glass for a great looking syrup package, not to mention preserving flavor. The problem, though, is that you have to finish your syrup just right for it to consistently look good in glass over the long-haul. We like to make our syrup extra-thick, and this sort of syrup develops sugar crystals eventually, clouding [...]