The Sugar House

Our family has been producing maple syrup here in the White Mountains for five generations. Our methods have changed a bit from our ancestors, but the finished product is still the finest maple syrup you will find anywhere!

Maple sap is only 2 percent sugar. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. This used to all be done on a wood fired evaporator, boiling out the water and sending it all out the roof in the form of steam.

The modern process utilizes miles of plastic tubing, replacing the wooden and tin buckets of the past. Each season a small hole is drilled in each maple tree to access the sweet sap within. At this time we have approximately 6000 taps and each year will produce about 2000 + gallons of maple syrup. The sap then runs through our tubing system to a stainless steel gathering tank where it is collected and transported to our sugar house. Once loaded into the sugar house tanks we run the sap through an RO (reverse osmosis) machine. This machine removes the majority of water out of the sap.

In my grandfather’s day it would take him 10 cord of wood to make 100 gallons of syrup. While we still boil our sap on the same type of evaporator that he used, the introduction of RO allows us to produce 100 gallons of syrup using only about 1 cord of wood. We will go through 30 or more cord of wood in the maple season.

Our syrup season is about 6 to 8 weeks long.
It runs from mid-February to mid-April. If you are in our neck of the woods at that time of year, we would love to show you first-hand how maple sap is turned into liquid gold!