5 Lessons We Learned Making Maple Syrup
We completed our second year making maple syrup, and I thought I’d share a few things we’ve learned along the way. When we started this journey, we honestly had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. I just knew that I had prayed long ago for a single maple tree someday, and here we are surrounded by a mixture of sugars and red. Honestly, more than we have the capacity for at the moment, but that’s for later.
The first lesson that I’ll share is this: when you pray for things, you know, those simple little prayers that you long for but maybe wonder if they’ll ever actually be for you? Yeah, those. Know that God hears you. Someday you may find yourself with more than the little you thought would be enough. When we looked at the house before purchasing, I knew there were a few maples, but I had no idea the extent. We didn’t get a lot of time to explore because the housing market was insane in 2021. So this was one of the first big surprises we found here.
Making maple syrup in an old-fashioned way (read: manual labor), is not for the faint of heart. As I said earlier, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into in 2022. We just bought some spiles and went on our merry way… we soon learned that we would be hauling buckets through mud, finding creative ways to do so, and getting stronger by the minute. Those 5-gallon buckets get heavy when they’re filled with sap, and we have a long walk. Add in dropping trees, chopping wood; and starting fires at 7:30 am just to keep it going all day long, and still have sap to boil. Well, let’s just say that we doubled what we did last year and we were exhausted by the time we finished.
We learned a couple of hard lessons too. The first one is that if you scorch a little sap on the edge of the pan, it’ll scorch your finished product. If you then don't clean that little scorched bit off, you’ll scorch your next batch too. We scorched a total of 4 gallons this year, which as a micro producer, is a lot. It was a sad day, but I did learn something about maple syrup in the process. We’re used to buying graded syrup in the stores, you probably see grade A because that’s what’s in the stores. There used to be graded A and B but it’s since changed and is now grade A light and A dark. This grading system is used to ensure the flavor, color, and clarity of syrup sold commercially for consistency. When syrup doesn’t fit the commercial grade scales, but is still good syrup, it is then graded lower and can be sold in large quantities to companies who use it for ingredients in their products. The syrup is still good syrup, but it may have niter (concentrated minerals formed in the cooking process) that didn’t fully filter out making the syrup cloudy, and an off taste to the perfect maple flavor (could be from the boil or evaporation process, but some trees just produce an off flavor some years, or the color is just too dark for the grading system. None of these make bad syrup, just not what most prefer on their pancakes. So I learned that the 4 gallons of scorched syrup can be used in the baking I do all year! It wasn’t a complete loss.
We learned that you start the season off super excited and you end the season wishing for the trees to bud and exhausted. The labor involved is extensive, and I think you kind of forget after a year goes by.
We learned that upgrades are needed to scale bigger in the coming years. We need a vehicle to help haul the sap from the back part of the property to the barn, we need a bigger place to boil more sap at once, holding tanks, and a filter press. This is an expensive venture and it’s not really profitable, but we love it. I think that at some point it can be profitable, but not in the beginning if you want to go big!
With all that, we’ve found that we absolutely adore making syrup. While we may end tired, we also end happy. Happy to have made a food for our family for the entire year, happy to be able to supply a small amount to friends and family, and proud of the work we put in.