While the sugar maple sap is running, weather has a dramatic effect on the end product. Above: Maple syrup made on different days, from warmest to coldest. Photo by Flickr user astanleyjones; published under Creative Commons license.
It might not be as flashy as the crocus -- a recent transplant, native to the Old World -- but the running of the sap in the sugar maple is the real harbinger of early spring in the Catskill Mountains. Maple syrup is one of the oldest traditional American foods, first made by Northeastern Indians, who taught tapping to the early European settlers, and now made mostly on family farms handed down from generation to generation.
Today, tomorrow, and next weekend, tappers and syrup-lovers across New York State are celebrating this year's crop with tastings, pancake breakfasts and syrup-making demonstrations. It's Maple Weekend, and it's a big, sticky, festive open house happening at hundreds of farms across upstate New York. Locally, most of the farms are in Delaware County, though there are a couple of farms in Schoharie County, and Frost Valley YMCA in Ulster County is holding syrup tastings and hands-on demonstrations both weekends.
This year should be an especially sweet one for local tappers -- a crucial combination of cold nights and warm days are yielding a good crop across New York State, says state Department of Agriculture and Markets spokesperson Jessica Ziehm.
"So far, we've seen good sap flow throughout the state," she said. "And the quality of the sap they've been seeing is good. It's tough to say because the weather could break tomorrow, but so far, so good."
Last year's syrup yields were disastrously low, when a bout of unusually warm weather slowed sap flow to a trickle across upstate New York. So a good crop is especially welcome.
These days, the equipment used to make maple syrup has gotten a lot more sophisticated, but the process is basically the same: collect sap, boil most of the water off, pour on pancakes. From a story in yesterday's New York Times, featuring local syrupmakers Shaver-Hill Farm:
Maple is one of the most natural and unadulterated liquids, even after processing, that you can buy. The clear, light-green sap is piped directly from the tree into a huge steel vat, then boiled down for long hours. This classic production process may conjure up rustic visions of burly guys in plaid shirts hauling metal buckets through the woods, pouring hot syrup into battered metal pans laid atop the snow, steaming sweetly in the winter air.
Hardly. While some makers still use buckets and do much of their work by hand, serious maple syrup producers long ago switched to a system of blue and black plastic tubing that makes their woods — known as sugarbushes — look more like outdoor laboratories.
On the more rustic end of the spectrum is Fox Hollow Farm, a couple of homesteaders just starting out in Shandaken, who have been documenting their adventures in making syrup on an outdoor woodstove on their blog. They found out that turning 70 gallons of sap into syrup is hard work:
Sugarin is a real process, a real labor of love. We ended up with 96 ounces....that's not quite ONE GALLON! Our syrup is super-dark, definitely would be considered a Grade B or lower if there is one, I think our evaporator set-up allows the sugar to carmelize too much. We'll be working on that for this weekends boil.
So, Even if syrup is selling for $60 a gallon, and even if we don't count all of the time that we spent setting up, lugging buckets, designing and building the evaporator....and only count the two long, full days of sap boiling....we made 2.25 dollars and hour! We're gonna really have to step step step it up if this is going to be a income-producing product.
(Grade B? Talk dirty to us, guys -- plenty of discriminating syrup-eaters prefer the more intense-tasting, lower-grade stuff. Or, as somebody put it on a friend's Facebook wall recently, "the stuff that looks like you haven't changed your motor oil in 12,000 miles.")
There's another new syrupmaker on the local scene, too: Dave Holscher of Roxbury Mountain Maple, a South Kortright pastor and serial entrepreneur who recently decided to get into the maple business, with help from his wife and eight children. From a profile in the Mountain Eagle:
As of last Wednesday, the Holscher family had tapped 50 of their 150 acres and Holscher said they have “50 more acres to tap.”
The season, according to Holscher, will most likely run into April and he intends to sell in bulk to large suppliers and a slogan taking from a psalm can be found on the maple syrup containers; “Taste and see, the lord is good”.
