Written for The Argo by Andrew Connolly

No one wants to be out in the cold, but for Ryan Hegarty, Lindsey Brown, and everyone else participating in the Stockton Maple Project, it is a necessity. Tapping trees could only be done in cold temperatures, more specifically the process necessitates below freezing nights and above freezing days to allow the sap to properly flow. Ryan Hegarty, the assistant director on the Maple Project, refers to this process as the “freeze thaw cycle.” The glucose provided by the sap is essential for the trees to blossom in the Springtime, a process known as photosynthesis. This leaves the winter months, where the trees remain dormant, as the only time tapping trees is practical, and more importantly, ethical.

When the Stockton Maple Project started in 2020, they were able to collect sap from only 89 trees. Over the last four years, they have been able to expand to 400 trees, and you can add 50 more to that total when considering their adopt a tree section of the Stockton Sugar Bush.

Even beyond the time of year and temperature, the process of tapping trees is ultra specific. The temperature at which maple syrup is made is around 219.5 degrees Fahrenheit , but this number fluctuates depending on factors such as atmospheric conditions, whether patterns, and aerometric pressure. Using too much sap means you’ll likely over boil the batch, which leads to diluting the pan or even burning it, but not using enough will force you to boil the batch for an atypical amount of time. This leads to people starting out in the sugar making field to ruin numerous batches before getting the process down, and you would be right. Hegarty summarized this when he said, “There’s sugar makers that burn their pan and then there’s liars.”

The process calls for 66.9 percent to 68.9 percent sugar content, which Hegarty mentions is measured in a metric known as “bricks.” The amount of sugar content decides how many gallons of sap are needed to create the syrup. The ratio is usually between 40 to 60 gallons of sap needed to make one gallon of syrup.

One gallon of this syrup will typically cost around $20 to $30, this sounds like a lot, but when you consider how labor intensive the process is, as well as the quality of the syrup, it makes sense. Lindsey Brown explains a method used by the project in order to educate children, one of the main tenets of the project, on being more knowledgeable and conscious of what they put into their body. The project presents the children with a bottle of Karo corn syrup, and Log Cabin syrup, and points out the corn syrup contents in both products are essentially identical.

“Log Cabin syrup is really just corn syrup, which is just a fast track to diabetes and has absolutely no nutrition in it but it’s dirt cheap and that’s why food producers like to sell it to you.” said Brown when further explaining the topic.

If you are looking to contribute to the project in any way, or just simply want to try good syrup, you can meet Ryan and Lindsey at the Sustainability Farm for Maple Boil and Farm Tour. The event starts will be getting underway on February 19 at 11 a.m. Anyone and everyone is welcome to participate.