Another Sugar Shack

Click for a closeup.  On the way to the next sugar shack, The Blog Tech made a friend, we named him Walter.

Goosebumps, we spotted another one!

Sorry to say this is the only photo we got of a food area.  But seriously, each and every one of the sugar shacks put out huge spreads.  The plaid tablecloth is covering a table groaning with maple treats.  This woman baked about 8 different kinds of cookies along with 4 dips and maple mustard.  All for free.  Amazing. On the corner table, they had their maple products for sale.  I bought a lot of stuff from this shack which I will show later.

This family had 6 very well behaved children who were very eager to answer questions and show us around.

The syrup was boiling when we arrived.

They were well prepared for weeks of sugaring off.

We took off in search of the next shack and passed this gorgeous barn.

And then we spied these guys down the road.

Buffalo!

And a rare white one that looks like she is about to be pooped on.

Beautiful farms everywhere.

And covered bridges.

At the next shack we got to see sap flowing into the buckets.

All of the shacks bought their equipment from Canada.  Interestingly, all of the shacks told us they sell their extra syrup to Canada and Vermont.  So, if you buy genuine Canadian or Vermont maple syrup, it might actually come from this area.

The machine in the back room on the right is a reverse osmosis machine which removes 75% of the water from the sap before boiling.  What this means is that instead of needing 50 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup, it now takes only 5 gallons of sap (once it goes through this machine) to make 1 gallon of syrup. The shacks are able to produce much more syrup in much less time once they implement this machine.

Here is the hot syrup coming out of the tank.

And here, the very nice sugar shack guy shows us the difference in grades.

 He also showed us how he uses the hygrometer.  Back tomorrow with more sugaring off.