The Consultant - 2018 - 14
MAPLE SYRUP: A STEIGERWALDT FAMILY TRADITION Firewood crew on break. We use a variety of bottle sizes and styles to suit different preferences. The evaporator in the sap shack, hard at work. color while the last few gallons usually finish to amber. Syrup contest judges like light syrup, but it all tastes great to us. Once we have collected enough sap to fill the storage tank, we begin evaporating the sap batch by batch. The early risers will start the fire around 5 a.m. with coffee in hand, and the day doesn't end until well beyond sunset, with family and friends joining us for a big meal and gathering around the evaporators late into the evening. Then we take the sap off the evaporator when it is "near syrup"- not yet finished cooking, but ready to be saved for finishing on another day. 14 When enough "near syrup" is stored up, we devote a weekend to finishing, filtering and bottling. A small gas-fired stainless steel unit helps control the temperature so the syrup can be finished perfectly. This unit holds up to 10 gallons, which we boil at 212 degrees until the temperature moves up to about 218 degrees. At this point, we start testing the sugar content with a hydrometer. When the hydrometer floats at the special red line, the syrup is done. The syrup is then pumped through a filter to remove any impurities and then is bottled while still very hot to ensure a tight seal. We use a variety of bottle sizes and styles to suit different preferences. Our production really depends on the season. Some years a fast warm-up stops the sap from running and the season is over quickly. Other years the weather is just perfect and the sap runs for weeks on end; in those years we end up dumping out buckets of sap because our crew of family and friends is "tapped out" by the end. Overall, we gather about 2,000 to 2,500 gallons of sap to produce about THE CONSULTANT 2018
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.