Sarah's Sugar Shack

Even though our town is blessed with at least four commercial maple syrup operations, Don decided that we should take advantage of the sugar maples on our property and give Sarah the chance to make her own syrup.  He fashioned taps out of PVC pipe, we saved milk jugs, and, in early March, he and Sarah tapped six of our trees.

As it turned out, this was not the ideal year to go into sugaring.  The weather was anything but cooperative. Instead of the warm days and cold nights needed for the sap to run well, winter refused to leave, and the sap was reluctant to flow.

By last week, they had collected about seven gallons of sap.  Spring seemed to finally be here, and the sap stopped running, so it was time to boil.  Don set up the operation on our fire pit and started boiling Thursday morning while Sarah was at school.  Thirteen hours later, he had about a quart of near-syrup.

The next morning, he finished evaporating it on the kitchen stove, where he could monitor the temperature carefully. As water evaporates from the sap, concentrating the sugar, the liquid boils at an increasingly higher temperature.  When the boiling syrup registers 7.1 degrees above the boiling point of water, it's done.

They ended up with just over a pint of beautiful amber syrup, which received the inaugural label "Sarah's Sugar Shack, Pure Homemade Maple Syrup."  We taste-tested it on our Sunday-morning French toast and all agreed it was yummy.

One of the sugar houses in town, run by and named for a now 58-year-old man, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.  If Sarah (and her able assistant) sticks with this, fifty years from now, she'll best him by three years!