Sap to Syrup

We have grown from making 1.1 gallons of syrup in the 2021 sugaring season to over 20 gallons in 2025. Each year we have gotten more sophisticated so we can make more syrup to share with friends and family.

2025 Season

We expanded to 92 taps on 80 different trees, with over 75% of the taps being located on over 1000 feet of tubing spanning across our sugar bush.

Steve's Sugar Shack

2024 Season

In the forth year we really hit our groove. We experimented with running long tubes through the woods that combined up to 10 trees to a single bucket, and upgraded our Reverse Osmosis Machine. We even tested making maple candy and fermented maple wine!

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2024 Season

In the forth year we really hit our groove. We experimented with running long tubes through the woods that combined up to 10 trees to a single bucket, and upgraded our Reverse Osmosis Machine. We even tested making maple candy and fermented maple wine! We made 19.5 gallons

Steve's Sugar Shack

2023 Season

In year three, we bought a reverse osmosis machine. This device takes half the water out of the sap before we start boiling - effectively cutting the boiling time in half, and doubling our capacity to make syrup! And we started spending more time thinking about sugaring in the summer and fall. We even went to a maple syrup industry seminar!

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2023 Off-Season

Ken and Steve went to a maple open house and sat through classes on filtering, tapping, and bottling. We upgraded our Reverse Osmosis Bucket to 10 gallons an hour (up from 8) and bought loads of tubing ahead of the new year!

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2022 Season

This was our most substantial season yet, with a massive expansion in our ability to collect and boil sap. We started collecting sap using 5-gallon buckets connected to the tap with tubing. We even tested routing multiple trees' sap into a single bucket. We also started storing the collected sap in a plastic 55-gallon drum with a spout on the bottom. But the biggest efficiency increase came from our brand new evaporator, made from a steel drum that my dad bought on Craigslist.

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2021 Season

I started out with a backyard sugaring kit that my brothers and I had bought for my dad over 15 years earlier. He had never used it because sugaring requires daily attention and work for around two months, and life has a way of making it hard to spend two months straight in the woods. But with COVID lockdowns, I was able to stay in Vermont for the entire sugaring season.

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