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From Kettle to Evaporator
In pioneer days, most
farms put out a few taps to produce maple syrup and sugar for home
consumption. Boiling was done in an iron kettle over an open fire. By the
middle 1800’s flat pans on an arch in “sugar shacks” were used for
boiling. Syrup has long been made on Burt Homestead. Since the 1960’s we
have developed a small scale commercial production. |
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Syrup for Sale
We package our syrup in gallons, half
gallons, quarts and pints.
Contact us for availability and
pricing. |
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19th Century Syrup Kettle |
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Flat Pans pre-1970's |
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Modern
Evaporator |
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We
use traditional methods with more modern equipment. We currently place
about 640 buckets on trees in our sugar bush. Our topography (our sugar
bush is on flat land) makes tubing difficult. We gather sap by hand and
bring the sap to a modern sugar house equipped with a stainless steel wood
fired evaporator. At the sugar house, sap is pumped to a holding tank
where it flows by gravity into a pre-heater and then into the evaporator.
The final finishing of the syrup is done in a gas fired pan and then pumped
through a filter press and into a canning unit. While still hot, the syrup
is packaged.
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Old Sugar Shack in Woods |
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New Sugar House at Farm |
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From
our 600+ taps we produce from 150-250 gallons yearly. Syrup production is
very dependent upon the weather conditions in the late winter and early
spring. Production depends not only on the quantity of sap collected, but
also on its sugar content. Normally it takes from 35-40 gallons of sap to
produce 1 gallon of syrup.
Work
on the syrup operation continues throughout most of the year as we normally
use 10-12 cords of 30 inch wood, all of which is cut and split on the farm. |
