- I still think it's fascinating.

It, it's, it as facinating the first day I saw it made, and I'm still in awe of the whole process, how we can drill a small hole in a tree and take this sap that looks like water and it's, it's the first sign of spring coming too, I got interested in maple syrup in about 1992.

A friend of mine was making maple syrup at a small scale, and I just found it fascinating how this pan was boiling and the sweet smell.

So we started off the next year, I got a lasagna pan to boil in, put it out in the driveway, had a lawn chair out there and 20 buckets to collect sap.

And we made our first gallon of maple syrup And we were pretty proud of that first gallon.

And we used it up within a few months.

- The first year as anything gets started, it was 20 buckets and then the next year was 80 and then the next year was a couple hundred.

And then after that it was, we're diving in, you know, try to, let's build our sugar house, let's go to the technology of the tubing and have 800 taps and, and that, that was the building made it be so, versus sitting in the garage in a lawn chair.

- Nice thing about maple syrup is you can do this at any level.

You can tap a couple trees or you can tap a couple million trees.

You're just gonna need bigger toys if you're gonna make more maple syrup.

It's fundamentally a very simple task.

We are taking about 3% of the sap from the tree.

The sap is mostly water, roughly about 2% sugar and 98% water.

And we're gonna reduce that down till we get to 67% sugar.

At that point we have maple syrup.

There's nothing added to it.

Strictly a natural product.

That went up fast.

Oh, it's not over.

No, but we're getting toward the top.

You can see the level.

That's an 1100 gallon tank.

Initially, when we first started making maple syrup, we would tap the trees and we had 20 buckets.

We would collect the sap in.

Now we've graduated to use a maple tubing and the tubing is also under vacuum, and we have upwards of 2,500 taps in the woods over a couple thousand trees tapping maple trees.

It really has no effect on the tree.

We're only getting about 3% of the sap from that tree.

By the time you come back to the tree next year, if its a healthy tree, that woundll be totally sealed over with fresh sap wood and the tree just keeps on growing.

It's kind of like giving blood.

You can give a pint of blood and youre fine.

Once the sap arrives at the sugar house, we gravity feed it into a basement tank.

It's a about a 1200 gallon stainless tank.

From there, it goes through a reverse osmosis machine and that machine takes some of the water out of the sap to reduce the boiling time.

- It's a split.

It's split.

So we need.

-So it, it runs smoothly for the most part until you as, as we've said, if something comes up you weren't expecting, you just gotta work through it and get back to being on schedule.

- When you make maple syrup, the whole family really has to be involved.

It's, there's a lot to it, especially the more taps we put out.

So myself and, and my wife Amy, you know, we equally work at this and it definitely has to be a team effort to get this done.

- There we go.

Okay.

Now what, - There are different options for the way of boil.

We currently use firewood still.

The other option is oil.

I, I just still like the firewood.

It's kind of the old fashioned way, it's traditional.

The best type of wood to make maple syrup with is free wood.

Once that temperature gets to seven degrees above boiling water, we are at maple syrup and we begin to draw the syrup off of the evaporator.

From there, the syrup is put into a finishing pan.

We'll bring it back to boil using propane so we can control the heat.

At that point, we're gonna double check our density with the hydrometer, the temperature got us close.

The hydrometer will get us exactly to the right density.

Once it goes through the filter press, we have maple syrup that's ready to go out to our customers.

There's no preservatives in that.

It's being packed at 180 degrees to be sterile.

Once you open your maple syrup, just keep it refrigerated and it's really good indefinitely.

If the sap's running, we're running.

We have to be out there.

We have to collect the sap then, so we, we may sometimes literally be going 24 hours a day for a couple of days and then it might be a slowdown for another day or two.

But we really have to adjust our schedule based on mother natures schedule.

Typically the maple season around here goes from early February to late March.

The definitive end of the season will be when the bud of the tree swells up to a certain size and the sap will become bitter.

Usually at about that point, you'll notice the frogs start to sound off at night.

Typically they say when you have three nights in a row of peepers the ground is warmed up to a certain point and the sap is no longer usable for maple syrup.

Making maple syrup is still something we, we do really love to do.

We're, we're still in awe that it, it's a tremendous natural product and, and it's the first crop that's made of the season.