We have about 30 acres in the hills of Cabot Vermont, which is in the north central part of the state. We have been producing maple syrup for over 10 years. We tap Sugar Maples for our maple sap. This year (2024) we tapped 89 trees with 104 taps. Some trees are big enough to have multiple taps. It takes anywhere from 43-60 gallons of maple sap to produce 1 gallon of maple syrup, depending on the yield for the year. This year our yield was about 50 gallons of sap to 1 gallon of syrup. We run tubing between a group of trees and run it downhill to one or two 5 gallon closed containers. We currently have about 13 runs of about 10-20 trees each that make up our total tree count. The flowing of sap is very weather dependent and can start anytime between the end of February to the middle of March. The flow of sap starts and stops many times depending on the weather for a period of about 6-8 weeks. Once we collect enough sap to begin boiling, we filter the sap through a reverse osmosis filter which takes out about half of the water content and then we boil the output of that on our wood cook stove in our kitchen. It takes many many hours to boil out enough water to produce each gallon of maple syrup. We’ll boil many days in a row depending on how fast the sap is flowing and we may do this several times during the season. Once enough of the water has boiled out to produce syrup and the density is just right, we will then filter the syrup in a very fine maple press to make it nice and smooth. At this point it’s ready to bottle. This year (2024), we harvested about 1225 gallons of maple sap and produced about 24 gallons of our McClure’s Pure VT Maple Syrup. You can see pictures of this process in our Maple Syrup slide show on this website. The maple syrup grade our trees have primarily been producing is called “Very Dark with Strong Taste”, which means it has a strong maple flavor. The darker the maple syrup the stronger the maple flavor. This particular grade is harder to find in stores and we find that our customers love it. Some of the comments we’ve received over the years from our customers include: “we love your maple syrup”, we look forward to some good eating,” “I’ve been buying your maple syrup every year for a few years now, and it is amazing,” “It’s always a pleasure dealing with you, and your maple syrup is outstanding,” “great tasking syrup.” We find our syrup great for anything from pancakes, waffles, cooking/baking, and even tea. We love it and hope you will as well. We look forward to hearing from you, our dear customers!
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