Making Maple Syrup - Part I

Male 1: Come on guys. Male 2: The most I’ve made in this sugar house is 74 gallons, we probably had 150 or 160 pails out. Male 1: Yeah. Male 2: I had a lot of help, you know, and it was a good year. Male 1: It’s a lot of work. Male 2: It is a lot of work, it’s a lot of work. Sometimes you do a lot of work and you don’t a get any product, which is I’m afraid, what is going to happen this year. Male 1: Yeah. Male 2: Two things that I’ve found, I use to tap this mountain with tubing, there was a lot of work, I didn’t get much product. The sugar content was down because those trees are growing out of glacier rock pile. The soil content obviously the trees are growing all along the side of the hayfield, you know, that are out in the open. Also I had a lot of trouble with squirrels. Male 1: Squirrels eat on tubing? Male 2: Oh terrible, don’t you hold the tubing, you only get the sugar and as I come here, there’s nothing right out of the tubing I’ll climbing up the mountain and I can see where they’ve been running on the ground all day long. Male 1: Yeah. Male 2: 1And what can I do about it, you don’t realize until you get home from work, you know. So I gave up, I went back to the old fashion way the buckets were here. A guys said we make handcrafted maple syrup, we tap 100% sugar maple trees, we tap off healthy trees. Male 1: So you can tell by the bubbles? Male 2: I can tell by the color of the bubbles. Male 1: When it’s ready to be poured off? Male 2: You see how shiny they are? Male 1: Yup. Male 2: You see how they’re shining here and they’re shining there and they’re almost kind of shining there and over there as foam. Male 1: Right, right. Male 2: I’ve been doing this long enough that I can tell by the bubbles. See that hanging there a little bit now starting to heat off? So we’re tapping off there. Male 1: Do you start the cooling in there? Male 2: Starting to heat off instead of drip off like water droplets which it looks like clinging a bit. Male 1: That’s another sign that it’s ready to be syrup? Male 2: That’s another sign. Male 1: So this is being close to getting ready then. Male 2: We’re going to pull this in a few minutes. Male 1: Take picture of me shoveling snow. The color just changes like boom. Male 2: What’s that? Male 1: The color just changes very quickly and the bubbles changed as well. Male 2: Yup, let’s put the fire down a little bit, so it doesn’t foam off. But I know that syrup in the pan because they shadow with the dipper, I can see with the dipper. I have it right here in the thermometer, okay. The fire is dying down, and the foam is dying down. I don’t want to foam up in this pan like it is over there. Male 1: Right. So you turned the fire down a little bit. Male 2: We let the fire go down. I have to pick it up here in a minute when it came to other job. Male 1: Okay. So, your role today is when it gets to 220, it’s syrup. Male 2: Yes. Male 1: Plus looking at the— Male 2: With the dipper? Male 1: So that has come off the tray into this container, so that’s today’s— Male 2: That’s right there, that’s what came out. Male 1: That’s beautiful. I like the darker syrup myself. Male 2: I started to tell you that. There’s a lot of people that goes by the color. It’s seems to be it has more of the maple syrup to it, you know the deeper you get into the season so to speak. Male 1: Yeah. Male 2: I have a lot of people that ask me—“oh yeah I rather have the dark”. Male 2: That’s great. Male 2: Right. I’m probably been coming up here since 1971, 72 to help my wife because I work in construction. This time in the year and the winter time I was always laid off, and I knew he was up here by himself, he was 80 years old, or 81 years old, he was 87 when he died. I used to come and help him. He’d be out here by himself trying to--all these trees over here he have to tap, all the ones down there he have tap, and he’d be up here trying to carry the sap one at a time. Male 1: So he call this the sap on, we put a hotdogs in the sap. Male 2: Raw sap I'm not sure. Male 1: Toasting of the buns. These are string beans, part of the maple north tradition. So, this is called the sap dog, they boil the hotdogs in the first part of the sap tray. Oh beautiful thing. Male 2: It’s in the woods, you know. I love it.