Maple Sugaring at Gould's Sugar House

for well over half a century on late winter mornings dozens of hungry people can be seen lined up waiting for the the doors to open at G's Sugar House they're here to take part in a long tradition on the Mohawk Trail in shelburn Massachusetts to Feast on the G family's famous pancakes and freshly made maple syrup and good morning folks morning how are you good night hello and you got a good picture there hell oh a princess that's wonderful you look beautiful and good morning too was it we wonder where you were you can see you at the entrance this morning hey I have I can't get all my work done to get down here the world's best golden pancakes and waffles are served up here drizzled with New England maple syrup made right here in the adjoining Sugar House it's a busy time for the entire staff their work goes on 7 days a week for for two months at a time in late winter and early fall customers who don't make the first seating are happy to let their appetites build even more while watching The age-old Craft of boiling maple sap for syrup a large Woodfired evaporator boils thousands of gallons of maple sap Every Spring to produce one of Nature's finest Treats but just what does it take to make all this happen long before the spring sugaring season there's a lot happening on the farm the maple trees are doing their part by storing up sugars as a product of photosynthesis as green chlorophyll drains from the Maple Leaves the spectacular orange and red colors are [Music] revealed the Gould family farm is over 100 years old it's still a working dairy farm and during the Summer and Autumn months the stands of Maples known as the Sugar Bush require [Music] attention in addition to all the daily chores a dairy farm demands wood must be cut and stored for the next sugaring season which usually begins in late February or [Music] March there's work waiting to be done in these Woods a lot of [Music] [Music] work the type of wood that we're cutting to use in the evaporators for our sugar wood is basically wood that's has no log value it's only good for wood mature wood which you can see this one's got knots in it got holes in it on the trailer got a soft maple that's got knots they're just mature wood it's time to be harvested and this is the most we can get out of it is using it for the evaporators and the for the to make the maple [Applause] [Applause] serf [Music] okay in addition to the daily chores of the farm firewood work goes on through the fall along with repair work to any of the equipment needed to make sugar usually we probably get more storm damage in the summer months to the hot thunder showers we have than we actually do from the snow and the ice in the winter so every year in the fall we have to take a trip through the woods in our Ro roads and clean up all the blowdowns and all the damage from the previous storm so when we start tapping the trees we have access to get through this will all be wood will be worked up to go onto the wood pile in the evaporators to boil the s load after load of firewood has to be processed and brought down to the Sugar House the wood shed is still not full the crisp colorful days of autumn blow away and winter brings a longing for warm spring Sun just enough snow falls overnight to put a white frosting on the Steep hillsides up here tubing is used to transport the sap from tree to holding tank some of these grand old maples have been filling the needs of many a sweet tooth for a long long time although these lines stay in place year round they have to be checked now and any breaks or leaks repaired then the hundreds of TAPS must be put into the trees and connected to the lines it's March the days are getting a bit longer temperatures are warming and the sap run is days away now on the more gentle slopes the ghouls still use traditional buckets and Taps on their sugar Maples with freezing nights and above freezing days the sap run has started time has come now to set Taps hundreds of taps one man drills the holes another man inserts the Taps oh yeah tools TS buckets and Lids it all has to be carried into the Sugar Bush the number of TAPS put into a given tree depends on its size tap holes cannot be reused because the trees defenses quickly seal off the leak so each year new tap holes must be drilled into each tree Taps must be inserted gently and carefully if driven in too hard or deep the bark will be split and sap will run around the tap instead of into the [Applause] bucket the crew will set about a th000 TAPS in buckets on this day the lack of winter snow makes this so much easier but it's not like this every year here's a look at some vintage footage from the past [Applause] Leonard and Larry have been tapping sugar maple trees since they were well since they were these guys this is [Applause] Larry lunch break in the woods many years ago boy the snow is deep just look at the wind these boys are walking in the deep snow I'm taking a picture of these buckets just because I wanted to show you how high the buckets are on the tree that shows exactly how much snow there was when the boys tapped this tree now they're going to have to reach up to get that bucket to empty it [Applause] the Taps are all in the sap is running and now real work begins when there's a good sap run these buckets fill up really quickly and have to be emptied at least once a day sometimes [Applause] more sap buckets are emptied into two 5 Gall pales which are then shuttled back to a collection tank the tractor drawn collection tank is periodically pumped into a truck mounted tank which can then be hul back to the Sugar [Applause] House not bad only 8 or 900 more to go come on Larry you can do it well Leonard hasn't run out of steam [Applause] yet and that's a good thing because across this corn field there's a lot more buckets the sugar content of maple sap varies from year to year depending on many variables but on average about 40 gallons of sap will only yield one gallon of syrup Wildlife is free to just walk or fly away but today the sap bucket are overflowing for a second time so it's now time for round two of emptying the more modern method of using tubing to gather the sap makes this a lot less labor intensive all right this is a vacuum releaser all the lines that are hitch to the trees which are several miles of them probably are all hooked up onto this one vacuum system it starts out at an inch and a half vacuum line and every runs an inch up the hill then it's got several Branch lines that go off the side 3/4 in down to inch inch to 3/4 in then the 56 in lines all come off there so there's probably several several miles of pipe and all the vacuum actually does is keep the sap in the pipe moving like in the low spots in the pipe it keeps pulling it along it's not like it's pulling it out of the tree it's just moving the sap along in the pipes to keep the flow a constant flow we're usually running about these gauges are a little bit off but usually if we can end up between 8 to 13 or 14 in of vacuum is where it seems to run the best for us there such a side Hill anyways it really doesn't need a lot of vacuum to get it down here if it was on a level spot you'd probably increase the V the inches of vacuum right now this is running probably these are probably two 2 and2 to 3 gallons is probably dumping every minute to 40 seconds to 2 minutes it's a moderate run today when it's really running hard you can get down to 15 or 20 seconds between dumps the vacuum is on one canister and as soon as one canister is full there's a float in there that shuts the vacuum off releases this canister starts filling the other one so it's a back and forth operation continuous so you here is going to dump now the next now it's going to start filling this side when that one's full the float will shut the vacuum Off You release and it'll be filling so you have a constant vacuum on at all times it's not a start and stop main idea is just keep the flow of the sap going through the pipes [Applause] this is a vacuum pump and the two red barrels are actually full of water and this is a water cooled vacuum pump we changed it over from oil to water we have a continuous flow of water going through here and it appears like it's working at it's more efficient with the water at 60° or less if the water gets too hot then it seems like we're losing vacuum so they've come up with a pretty much a 60° temperature where the vacuum is most efficient through this type of pump but this will run all day long just at that constant [Music] vacuum all the sap that the ghouls collect from their Farm or that they purchase from other Farmers is unloaded into these storage tanks okay all of our sap is trucked in and it's dumped into these holding tanks outside and they check for volume and the sweetness and then from there it goes down Sellar to a big smint block tank down Cellar then from there it's pumped up overhead into this overhead tank here and it runs gravity through that white pipe over to a float box on this side we control the rate of flow coming in we're trying to maintain a depth of an inch or so on that front pan all the time so it's a constant flow you've always got sap coming in and we fire every 0 10 or six probably every five or six minutes good [Music] morning this if you notice there's two sections here this is called a steam away what happens is you're utilizing the steam from the flu pan to preheat the sa so it's preheated it comes in cold and it comes out about 200° it drops into this flu pan and it comes through this tube here into this box and it goes into the front pan and circulates around until it finally gets right here and it can't go any further cuz I've got this ho plug so we we monitor the temperature right here this is a temperature probe and on this wall here is the temp is at the actual temperature in there right right now we're reading about 26.8 when that matches up with the uh we got syrup set on 2195 that we think that's about where it is today but we don't know if for sure we've got to test it as we take it off but when that top figure matches the bottom figure this automatic draw will will turn on and allow the syrup to come out as long as the temperature HS that will continue to flow when the temperature Falls below syrup it'll stop so it's an ongoing you know you've always got a constant flow of sap coming in you fire every five or 6 7 minutes and as you come to temperature sure you draw it off this is a syrup hydrometer and what we'll do is we'll fill this cup and we'll set that in there and it'll give us a hot test I know you can't read it but this line right here says hot Test 2 211 so by the time you take a test cup out of there and you put this in there it should be pretty close to that 211 and it this red line should float right on the surface of the syum that will tell you that it it is syrup okay that gives us something to go by but the final test the final test is what what we use is a hydrotherm and again we we can fill this cup up and put it in there and we can test it at any temperature it's got a a temperature probe in there and it'll it'll test it hot or cold whatever the temperature of the syrup is you you want that red line to float slightly above the surface of the syrup so we're almost there we probably got another couple of degrees to go and I can show you how this works that syrup is 7° above the boiling point of water so that's what we're looking for when we get this full it's got wheels on the bottom of it we can wheel it like this right over in the corner and we filter it through this filter press and from here we can either fill jugs with it or we can fill barrels with it whatever we want to do after every fire we come up here and we dump a little bit of this deforming agent it does the same thing as butter and cream it's it's a factory uh deformer and we dump a little bit in here a few drops and what it does is prevent the foam in the front pan from foaming out onto the floor these pallets I think they hold about 2/3 of a cord we probably go through six or eight of these a day if we have a good day in the course of the year you know we probably burn upwards to 100 qu of wood so if you come back and 3 weeks I'll let you know if we had a good year or not you can tell by looking in the Woodshed if there's not much wood there you know we had a good year right now we're driving off the finished product finished syrup scoop it belt lot of Scoops the first day of boiling in 2016 looks like we're making a nice light syrup so right now it's drying off at 220° once the temperature drops down below it's just it'll shut off it's up to temperature and it just shut off cuz it dropped below the temperature so right now I'm going to test and see how hot it's coming out we want it to be about 219° these and that looks just about perfect and right now we're adding wood to the fire we try and keep it right around 700° on a good day we'll go through about four cords of wood how did this whole operation come about well we started here on a sort of a it was my husband's dream not mine he always said that he'd like to have his Sugar House Down on the highway so we began to purchase land we purchased this farm that this sugar house is sitting on and we bought some more land of that farm halfway up the hill and our horses were drawing the sap in those days and they were getting tired to Lug that syrup up the house my husband's like that idea because now he could have his Sugar House Down on the highway we made a little dining room upstairs my husband's tore down one Barn to build this room that we're standing in right now and in here we had two evaporators we bought a new one and brought our old one down from the Old Sugar House and that was in 1960 so this is our 57th sugaring year here we thought that sugar on snow was going to be the big event and I said we are got to sell pancakes you think so he said and so we said sugar on snow was going to be it but it wasn't pancakes won and more people ordered pancakes and the next thing we knew he tore down two more Barns and made the big dining room so that we could accommodate more people the gift shop was added in 1965 horsedrawn wagon rides were offered to customers in the 1970s it was always a pleasure to talk with Mr Gould who was a highly respected man in the area he was nationally known for the Border Collies that he raised and sold he was one of the original directors of the Franklin land trust and a director of the Massachusetts Maple Association his family has worked this farm for over a hundred years daughter Linda has run the gift shop for many years and cans all of the maple syrup a lot of maple candies were made over the years by this lady felita Peters and the work isn't over yet once the sap has all been boiled there's all those buckets that have to be washed out and cleaned with steam and stacked up for next [Music] year [Music] you this is how it was done years ago and it's still being done the same way today where are the guys [Music] nickar this is maple sugaring on the Gould [Music] Farm [Music]

Channel: New England Forests

Views: 59,385

Keywords: maple sugar, maple syrup, sugar maple tree, Gould's Sugar House, Shelburne, Massachusetts, Mohawk Trail, making maple syrup, tapping maple trees, New England Forests, Shelburne Falls, Berkshires, pancakes, waffles, Gould's pancake house, maple candy, maple cream, pancake restaurant

Id: 578AfZkwi5Y

Length: 31min 56sec (1916 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 21 2016