The art of making maple syrup
Hudson-Catskill Newspapers
NEW LEBANON - The snow was almost completely melted and the daytime temperature was reaching the mid-fifties. The sap was beginning to flow and inside the Hand Hollow Sugar Shack in New Lebanon, Larry Benson, his face reddened by the heat, was stoking the fire that was helping produce the sweet smelling steam rising upward.
Outside near Benson's sugar bush, Bonner McAllester and Susan Cerny, of the Columbia Land Conservancy, were discussing the history and process of turning sap into maple syrup.
The event was sponsored by the CLC, a nonprofit land trust that works in partnership with landowners and communities in the county to protect wildlife habitat, farmland, and rural open space.
"We educate the public on the environment and the importance of preserving it," said Cerny.
Cerny said that the CLC had done similar events to this one in the past.
Behind the two women and the crowd of people there for the event, five miles of plastic tubing snaked from tree to tree and down to the sugar shack.
Inside, Christine Dreyfus, Benson's neighbor and partner in the operation, worked steadily as she explained the process.
The sap from 800 gravity-fed taps collected in two separate containers that drained into a 700-gallon tank. It was then pumped into the evaporator, a wood-fired stainless steel machine.
"The whole thing is plumbing," said Dreyfus.
The sap, which has a 2 percent sugar content, will eventually become much thicker and richer with at least a 66 percent sugar content. It takes 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup.
Dreyfus explained that a hydrometer is used to determine when the syrup is ready.
She said the amount of syrup the 800 taps produced varied from year to year.
"Last year we produced 200 gallons," she said. "Last year was a good year."
Last year did seem to be a good year for New York state maple syrup producers. New York produced 322,000 gallons, beating out Maine for the number two spot behind Vermont.
The early spring is when maple syrup production takes place, when the days are warming up, but the nights are still below 40 degrees.
"You do it too early and it will stop running," McAllester said of the maple sap.
She owns a sugar bush and maple syrup operation with around 450 taps near Great Barrington, Mass.
She said the number of taps on a tree depended on the size of the tree
"A tree that's 22 inches around can get two taps," she said, but, she added, tapping stresses the tree so it's important not to over-tap.
"It may get a virus or fungus," she said.
The history of producing maple syrup or other sugar products from tree sap begins with the Native Americans who once populated the Northeast.
The Native Americans would cut a slash in a maple tree and collect the sap as it dripped out. It was then poured into hollowed out logs. Hot stones were then added causing the sap to boil.
McAllester said that the Native Americans would whip air into the syrup until it became sugar. "It was pale, almost white, and granulated," she said.
The early European settlers learned the art of mapling from the native people. Metal buckets were used to collect the sap, something that is still done.
McAllester uses both the newer technology of gravity-fed plastic tubing as well as the more traditional buckets.
"We use buckets where tubing wouldn't work," she said.
Robin Andrews, a Philmont resident there for the event, said she had learned quite a bit about sugar mapling. "I didn't know much about maple syrup," she said, adding that she had a vague memory of going to a sugar shack as a child and enjoying it. "I think it was the smell," she said with a smile.
