Making true maple syrup is sensitive business. At the sugar bush near our home, you can see the syrup being made the way it was hundreds of years ago as well as the way it is made today. At the old fashioned sugar shack, there are 3 large cast-iron cauldrons. After the sap is harvested, it is boiled by fire in the first cauldron for 8 hours. It is then manually transferred into the second cauldron where it boils down for another 8 hours. Finally it gets spooned into the 3rd cauldron where it finishes off boiling for the final 8 hours. By that point, the sap has now boiled into thick auburn syrup. Making syrup the old way took a lot of time and patience.

The modern way is certainly easier...sap is collected via plastic tubing which is strategically strung amongst the maple trees. The tubing runs down into a large collection vat inside the wooden shack where it then slowly transfers into an evaporator. Logs lite the fire that heats the evaporator. The sap takes about 5 hours to boil down into syrup and once it reaches 104F, it is ready to pour through the filter cloth into collection bottles.

The color of the syrup also changes as the season progresses. At the beginning of March when the sap starts to run, the sugar content is about 4%. So once it boils down it is a light beautiful amber color. As the season progresses toward the end in mid April, the sugar content of the sap decreases to about 1%. It takes longer to boil down. The caramelization is stronger in the syrup and thus the color can be a very rich, dark brown. The taste is richer and heavier because of this. The lighter syrup has less of the smoky caramelization. Regardless of the colors, fresh maple syrup is absolutely delicious and a favorite treat of ours every early spring. And after a nice long walk through the hills of the maple sugar forest, we sampled this golden delicacy along with a tasty stack of buttery pancakes.