maple happenings at hhf ~ week 3

We’re in the midst of our best sap run of the 2021 season. Its been a wild ride this week, and we’re starting to feel the sugaring season fatigue. The days are long but the season is short.

A typical day always starts with farm chores - feeding and checking on animals. The maple tasks are weather dependent. On a good sap run day, we’re out checking pumps and vacuum gauges. We hike the lines in the woods if there are signs of a leak in the system. We’re running trucks with tanks to haul sap home to our sugarhouse. We don’t have any productive maple trees on the home farm, so we haul all our sap in from our sugarbush in Newport and a leased property in Lempster. Once sap is at the sugarhouse, we pump it into holding tanks and process it through our reverse osmosis machine. Sap is naturally around 2% sugar, and the ‘RO’ machine removes some of the water to yield a concentrated sap at around 10-11% sugar. The ‘RO’ machine saves on our fuel consumption (firewood) and our time spent in the sugarhouse. It makes everything more efficient. The concentrated sap flows slowly into our wood fired evaporator system, boiling off water until it reaches syrup at about 67% sugar content. We use a hydrometer to test our batches. Many people don’t realize all the science that goes into this process!

We’re not done yet though. Once we have a batch of syrup, it must be filtered and heated back up to 180 degrees in our ‘canner’. We then store it in large barrels or fill the various sizes of plastic jugs and glass bottles to sell.

In last week’s blog post, I spoke a bit about how the weather affects our seasonal timing and maple syrup production. Ideally, we like temperatures to be 40+ degrees with no wind during the day and below freezing, around 20 degrees, at night. In this weather window, our maple trees produce sap that carries minerals and nutrients to their buds. Don’t worry, we only take about 10% of what the tree produces… so they still have what they need to thrive. The maple season ends when the buds burst and the sap becomes thick and sour to smell and taste. The super warm temperatures have sugarmakers nervous this week. We are in the midst of three consecutive nights above freezing with temperatures 60+ during the day. The frost in the ground was deep this year, and so far our woods are holding on. We’re optimistically making as much syrup as we can and praying that the season holds on until temperatures fall back below freezing. I hope I can write again next week to share that Mother Nature gave us a scare but we’re still marching toward April with many boiling days ahead of us.

Weekly Stats

2021 Maple tap count
2500

**First Boil - March 1, 2021**
**Starting March 20, 2021**
Five Consecutive Boiling Days
All Dark Robust
**March 22, 2021 - 88 Gallons**
New HHF Record Daily Total!
**Maple Syrup Total as of 3/25**
421.5 Gallons
We made 257+ Gallons in the last week alone.

Once again, we are grateful for the many people that made the trip out to the sugarhouse this past weekend. Although we are recognizing the entire month as ‘maple month’ this year, last weekend would have been the traditional ‘NH maple weekend’. It still felt special as visitors enjoyed a tour, tasted a fresh sample, and explored our new shop.

In just three weekends, we are nearly sold out of our grass fed beef. There is still beef sausage and roasts left for those interested. The next restock is in May/June. With a slow start to the season, its been tricky keeping maple syrup inventory on the shelves. At this moment, we have a very small amount of Golden and Amber syrup available. We have all sizes in Dark Robust, which also happens to be my personal favorite. It’s light enough flavor for all around use, but also excellent for cooking. Don’t forget to look through our recipes page for suggestions.

March 27th and 28th is the last official weekend of Maple Month. Please join us to celebrate spring! If the season holds on (and we think it will), we plan to be open Easter weekend - April 3rd and 4th.