Home-Grown, Home-Cooked 100% Pure Maple Syrup – 100% Vegan

~ Voted best Maple Syrup around!~

 

 

 

 

How Our Syrup Is Produced

 

We’ve been told we have some of the best syrup around. While selling the syrup at the Trufant Flea Market, I gave out samples and SOLD large containers of syrup to people who SWORE up and down that they hated real maple syrup. After trying ours, they went on to buy large containers to take home!

While some of the delectable flavor of our syrup comes from excellent collection and cooking techniques, we can’t claim all the credit. Much of maple syrup’s flavor is derived RIGHT FROM THE GROUND. Some areas, such as Northern Michigan, have a high limestone content, which turns the syrup flavor less desirable. Our ground is a mix of dense peat/black topsoil and clay underneath. It seems to give us some fantastic-tasting syrup!

Our sap is produced mostly from Black and Sugar Maples with a few Silvers and Reds located on our back 30 acres.

We tap our trees gently using 5/16 taps with short drop hoses into food grade buckets on the ground.

The sap is so good, you can drink it right off the tree (although we save this for the end of season when we pull the taps!).

The buckets are filtered into a large 300 gallon container which is transported to the sugar shack.

We run an automated system, so sap is added as needed by the float box. As the sap cooks, it travels along the channels until it reaches the end where it finalizes into syrup and is dispensed out into the filter and bottler box.

The filter/bottler is water-jacketed, state-of-the-art. It filters nearly every trace of cloudy sediment out, keeping syrup crystal clear and at the perfect bottling temperature. Too hot and you get sugar crystals. Too cold and you get mold. Perfectly bottled syrup should last well over a year, un-opened.

Our syrup is wood-fired, so you get that classic smoky taste!

 

Curiosities about Syrup

• Maple syrup contains dozens of different flavor components, allowing it to garner a flavor ranging from butter to cinnamon to even chocolate. Each flavor created depends on the ground the trees are located in, the type of tree, the amount of sun it receives during that tapping sequence, atmospheric pressure and sugar content. Flavors seem to mellow out with age, but are most noticeable right off the cooker!
• Sugar content of a maple tree is NOT 4%. Each variety of tree has a general range (Silvers at the lowest at about 1.5% to 2%, and Sugars at the highest at UP TO 4%). Sugar content varies wildly from day to day, according to the weather as well as how much an individual tree has to fight for sunlight and nutrients. A lone sugar maple in someone’s front yard will have a much higher sugar content than  a silver maple in a swamp.
• It can take anywhere from 40-60 gallons of maple sap to create 1 gallon of maple syrup (depending on sugar content).
• SUGAR SAND IS NOT SUGAR. If you have any maple producer tell you this, run. They have no idea what they are doing! Sugar sand is actually called “Niter”, and it’s a collection of minerals, compounds and impurities that develop during normal cooking. It does NOT taste good, so don’t eat it (it is not poisonous however)! Proper filtering on high quality equipment will clean all of that out.
• Cloudy Syrup: This is a result of improper handling techniques (usually). Sap will rot just like milk (as they say) and if allowed to rot, it will turn any syrup created, cloudy. Also syrup not cooked to the proper temperature will allow bacteria to grow, also causing cloudiness.

 

Facts On Our Syrup and Cooking

• We cook our syrup to temps ranging from 121* to 123*, giving us a brix value of over 68.0 (syrup needs to be at least 67).
• Cooking temps depend on atmospheric conditions of that day
• We don’t use any animal products to produce our syrup. Our foaming agent is vegan-friendly and our filters are all synthetic
• Last year our cooker averaged 12-14 gallons of sap burned an hour (we hope to improve that to 20 gph in 2017)
• Our “Sugar Shack” is really a shack. It consists of a giant tarp wrapped around pallet racking and anchored into the ground with massive spikes

• The sugar shack is the farm “hang-out” during cooking sessions. Despite the tiny confines within, family and friends all squeeze-in to watch the assembly-line play-out. Cats cover guests laps, and jackets come-off in the warm, damp room.

• Despite what it seems, cooking syrup on our new system is quite exciting. At any given moment sap might splash wildly out of the cooker, or it might foam-up and boil-over, or the temperature rises and you hold your breath waiting for the cooker to spit out a new batch of syrup into the filtering unit (the first shot takes 4-6 hours, then happens every 15-30 minutes thereafter).
• You can smell the sap cooking  . . . all the way down the street!
• Our syrup sells-out quickly.
• We tap 150 trees, with the gross potential to do 500+
• We do use our syrup for trades 😉
• The year before last, we ate through 3 full gallons of syrup in our house. In 2016 we only ate through 2 because our waffle maker broke, and we prefer waffles over pancakes!