Maple time in Maine
Walkabout: PI
Happenings in the Star City
This Sunday is, of course, Easter, but along with church, egg hunts and family dinners, there’s another event going on that’s as sweet as — well, syrup. March 27, 2016 is also Maine Maple Sunday, when maple producers around the state open up their sugar houses and shops to share their craft.
Officials with the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry, as well as the Maine Maple Producers Association, reported a few weeks ago that tapping was underway around the state, thanks to unseasonably warm temperatures.
As a matter of fact, as reported in The Star-Herald on March 9, C.J. and Jodi King of Easton, owners of The Maple Moose, began tapping Feb. 22 and in five days had collected enough sap to make approximately 20 gallons of syrup. That was the earliest they had ever processed syrup in their eight years in the business, C.J. King told reporter Anthony Brino.
Most sugar houses will offer samples and demonstrations of how syrup is made, according to the MMPA website, along with sugarbush tours and other activities. Maine Maple Sunday is always the fourth Sunday in March, officials said, but some producers offer events both Saturday and Sunday.
Other local sugaring operations participating include: Emma’s Maine in Presque Isle, Bradbury Farms in Bridgewater and Rural Pride in Woodland.
This is the first year Emma’s Maine, located on the Parkhurst Siding Road, has participated in the special event, said owner Scott Arndt from his sugar house last week.
He said things did indeed get off to an early start this year. “I’d say the season started at least three weeks early, compared to the last four or five years, which is a challenge to be prepared,” he acknowledged. “Most people don’t tap trees until sometime in March, and [this year] if you were to get the first flow of the season, you had to have everything in at the end of February.”
Arndt taps just under 1,000 trees, a number that has grown in each of the business’s four years.
“I started off doing it as a hobby, and then decided I wanted to make it into an actual commercial sugar operation,” he reflected. “We knew at the beginning that we wanted to get to 1,000 trees, but it takes time. It’s a very labor-intensive business to set up, and it took just that long to get everything that we wanted in place.”
Of course it’s too soon to tell how much syrup those trees will yield, but Arndt estimated a harvest of around 200-300 gallons.
Along with the trees, the facilities have grown, to include a new building and evaporator.
“We’ve got some new equipment and a new building that’s accessible for people to get to,” said Arndt. “The equipment we got was too big for the old building, so we either had to renovate or find a new space.”
The recently acquired evaporator is wood-fired. “It’s a set of blowers that push the air back into the firebox so that all the gases get burned up as well. It differs from a traditional natural-draft [evaporator], where a lot of the gases go up the chimney. It’s supposedly more fuel-efficient, and there’s almost no visible smoke from the smokestack when it gets going.”
He explained the namesake of Emma’s Maine is a big part of the story, as well. “Emma is my daughter, a 20-year-old special-needs person with an intellectual disability, and we wanted to have something for her to participate in,” he said. “She is the official taste tester.”
Sunday’s activities will include tours of the sugarhouse, some syrup sampling, and there should be some sap boiling, Arndt noted.
“It looks like this is the first year in three or four years that syrup makers will actually have sap on Maine Maple Sunday, due to the earlier season,” he added. “It’s a nice way to spend the day and see a very traditional operation with some modern technology.”
For more information on the day’s events and participating sugar operations, visit mainemapleproducers.com.
Maple memories
Maple has been one of my favorite delicacies ever since I can remember. When I was a child at Gouldville Elementary School, there was a teacher, Mrs. Bouchard, who would bring sugar cones we could buy for a quarter each: small cones wrapped in birch bark, filled with maple sugar.
We eagerly awaited the arrival of those little treats, sometime in March or even April, when the snow had lost its charm. All day long on maple sugar day, tiny crunches punctuated every class.
My great-uncle, who lived in New Hampshire, would send us a gallon of fresh maple syrup each Christmas. It came in a square metal can, encased in a wooden crate. Mom and Dad would put it in the freezer to preserve it (because it seemed we always had a little left over from the year before), then thaw it to enjoy throughout the year.
(The pancakes were Dad’s realm. He would make some grown-up-sized, of course, and then tiny squiggles and shapes and silver-dollar-sized ones for me. Buckwheat were the best.)
I had the opportunity to visit a sugar shack (cabane a sucre) in Quebec some years ago, where they do it up big. There was a dining hall with wide windows overlooking the sugarbush, and the aroma — oh, the aroma! — of maple, mixed with coffee and bacon and home fries and pancakes and any number of good things, enveloped us at the door. We sat on worn wooden benches and enjoyed a maple-enhanced meal, followed by taffy on snow.
There’s still snow, and the sap is simmering. In this lull between dormant winter and waking spring, the run of the sap is the year’s first harvest. Try some maple treats and enjoy the freshening air that heralds the coming of the new season.
