Maple Syruping: A True and (Nearly) Digital Story

Today we took the Pigs to the North Hadley Sugar Shack.

To Make a Gallon of Maple Syrup...

This is the basic overview.

That's right, 40 gallons of sap to make one single gallon of syrup.

(No wonder it costs so much at Whole Foods.)

Throughout the Pioneer Valley, little tin cans can be found, hanging off trees...

... and if you look up close, you can see the sap dripping in.  One.  Drop.  At.  A.  Time.

Collection trucks ply the valley, and empty into a tanker like this one....

... which is connected up to a hut that does a rough filter....

... before it feeds into the Sugar Shack.

The operation uses a whole lot of wood.

The boiling vats are kept roaring all day and all night for the three to five weeks each spring and fall that the sap is running.

Maple syrup is maple sap, boiled down.  For a long time.  That's the whole recipe.  (The sap is 98% water.)

The process generates a lot of steam.

After it's boiled down to syrup, it's piped out through a simple filter (the stuff that gets bottled and sold is filtered an additional time).

Then the customers get to drink shots of pure syrup.

(No kidding.  I couldn't make that up.)

(And I tell ya, it's delicious.)

Another part of the operation makes the syrup into maple sugar....

... and maple candy...

.... but the main event is still the syrup.

Worth the wait.

(Yes, those are chocolate pancakes, beneath that lake of maple syrup.  We were with the grandparents, what can I say.)

And just to keep us all honest....

Here's another way to document the process, and reinforce the Lessons Learned:

This booklet was hanging off a hook, nailed into one of the beams holding up the Sugar Shack's roof.

It's made of laminated construction paper.  Each page is a crayon drawing made by a different member of a kindergarten class that took a field trip to the Shack.  At the end of the school year, the teachers donated it to the owners.

You know what?  It gets the job done too.