Maple Syrup
We started making maple syrup in 2014. We have a large maple grove next to our house and started with about 200 taps and a small evaporator on a gravel floor. We would have to drive a tractor and trailer to get the sap and bring it back to the evaporator.
We have since upgraded! We now have a Leader 3x8 reversed fired oil evaporator with over 3,500 taps on a wet/dry tubing system with vacuum. In 2020, we decided to peruse an organic certification and we were certified in 2021.
We now pump all the sap up to a holding area where it is ran through a Reverse Osmosis (RO) machine. The RO machine takes out some of the water in the sap to make a concentrate.
The concentrate is then boiled in an evaporator until it is syrup. We put the syrup through a filter press to remove the sugar sands and make the syrup a nice clear product. We then either bottle the syrup or put it in bulk drums to be sold to large commercial producers.