Maple Syrup Season: The Kick Off.

If you say Maple Syrup in this region, you say Gordon Patterson! We went to visit Gordon a few days ago because he was about to start the season. The season usually starts in March and ends in the same month so everything depends on the weather in that period. It's very impressive how Gordon does it. He taps around 1300 trees on his property every year, it took him three days. All the taps are connected with tiny pipelines ending up in bigger pipes. The bigger pipes are connected to a vacuum pump in a shed down in the woods. When Gordon activates the pump, maple sap is running through the pipes ending up in a giant 'bathtub' in the shed.

He pumps the sap in big containers on a tractor trailer and brings it to the 'Sugar Camp'. We got a ride on the trailer and brought back a thousand liters of maple sap. That's a lot of sap but in the end Gordon will end up with only a two hundred and fifty liters of syrup from that batch. Four liters of sap only gives one liter of syrup!!!

The sap gets filtered tree times and ends up in a brand new stainless-steel installation in the 'Sugar Camp'. It's the first season Gordon uses the new machine so it's all new to him this year. So the sap goes into the system to heat up, a big fire is made underneath. To get from the sap to the syrup you have to reach a temperature of 219°F, thats eight degrees above the boiling temperature of water or a 104°C. It can take about five hours to cook the first batch and you constantly have to keep an eye on the machine. It can take a few thousands of liters to get to the first syrup and that day we didn't make it with our batch. 

As the water evaporates, fresh sap keeps on running through the system and cools it down again, that slows the proces down. But you need this circulation to equalize the total heating of the batch in order to get a better control on the proces and the temperature. It's a very thin line between the best syrup and burned syrup. So if you're running out of sap before you reach the right temperature, you have to cool the system down and wait till the next day for a fresh container. Once you got syrup running in your system it all goes much faster! By heating up the sap, the sugar concentration goes from 3 to 67% in perfect conditions.

Well I can assure you that it takes a lot of work and patience to get to the perfect Maple Syrup and Gordon, who is in his late seventies by the way, does an excellent job. His syrup is the best we've tasted so far and we were very happy to see how he makes it! In the old days they used over three thousand buckets to collect the sap, and some people still do. These days in Patterson's woods, there's only one 'OldSkool' tap left to see for tourists like us!

So basically it's easy, you cook a certain amount of lifesap from the Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum) till you reach a certain temperature and you end up with a quarter amount of very addictive syrup. The Sugar Maple (Suikeresdoorn) is a native species in North-America from the westcoast of Nova Scotia to southern Ontario and in a few states of the USA. The province of Quebec is the biggest Maple Syrup producer.

What an exciting day! Mmmmm you should try it in your coffee...

Well...we live, we learn...

Sweet kisses

T&H.