First Maple Syrup Tasting

One additional joy this year in sugaring was seeing our little Lucy start to become more aware of what’s going on. She loves coming with us up the hill in the backpack, and – for better or worse – she appears to like maple syrup as much as I do. Here she is having her first taste of the year.

We’re at one quarter of a normal year’s crop right now, which would be a find place to be most mid-Marches, but with the hot weather in the forecast, this could be a short year.

Fortunately, we have access to the maple production of a number of farmers in the region, so our customers need not worry about supply. And we still harbor hopes that after this week, things will normalize and we can get a good piece of that remaining crop.

Our new “dry lines” are working very well, so if the weather cooperates, we should be able to make it up quickly.

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.

Two taps in one stain zone. Why?

Being the skeptical sort, we’re taking 30 or 40 trees and double-tapping them so that we can see if indeed the valved sap adapters do continue to throw sap later into the season.

To set up this experiment, we’re tapping both spiles one right above the other. This won’t necessarily tell us how much sap each one produces, but it should tell us the period during which one sap is more active than another. If the current research bears out, the older taps will stop a week or so before the adapter-equipped ones. We placed the taps atop one another so as to minimize the staining done with the two holes. The sapwood stains in a largely vertical pattern (a couple feet above and below the hole), so this configuration of tapping should minimize additional damage to the tree. It also eliminates aspect as a factor affecting the timing of the tapholes drying.

Stay tuned, and we’ll have a decent anecdotal indication of effectiveness. Incidentally this should be biased toward the new valved sap adapters because our older taps are generally a couple years old, so they should be harboring the microorganisms that cause taphole drying.

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.

Price Check for Maple Syrup

Buying Maple Syrup, Price Predicting

If time allows, both will be updated prior to the next season. That will provide interesting longitudinal price data.

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.

Like Matchsticks

As it is, I spent some time up in our main bush today, cleaning lines and making sure things look pretty for the seasonal neighbor who comes in August. This is how I discovered that a couple weeks ago there must have been an enormous wind event. I found about 20 or 30 big maples twisted up and toppled in a fairly small area. The trees were pushed over, pivoting on uprooted root balls in a northeasterly direction, which is odd. These trees are sheltered from northeasterlies from Cooks Hill behind them. These are precisely the trees I would have expected would be protected from winds from that direction.

Root Balls Came Right Over

It’s pretty much a mess that’ll take something close to a man-week to clear out – not what your expecting wife wants to hear at T-minus 30. I’ll be taking a trip up there with the big Jonsered saw tomorrow, perhaps make a dent in it.

(Friend's) Vacuum Extractor

After this, we started observing the vacuum levels relative to the precipitation and found that after three or four days without moisture, our vacuum level started a similar decline. Perhaps 5 percent per day. In every instance, a rain event of more than a few minutes brought us back up to normal.

We concluded that our tap holes were shrinking away from the spiles during the dry periods. This sounds like a pretty simple explanation, but I hadn’t heard others making mention of it. If true, I’ve wasted a lot of line fixing time running around trying to tighten a system whose trees were merely parched. It may also be that this is peculiar to the type of spile used (Lapierre). Would be curious if other maple syrup makers have noticed anything similar.