pure. We love our trees for more than their sap.
To ring in the 2020s we replaced our entire maple collection system including 50+ year old main lines with brand new, food grade, recyclable tubing. We use all stainless steel fittings, so they can be reused again and again. Only potable water and food grade pumps to transport the purest sap to our sugar barn. Our practices from forest to bottle are inspected each year by Baystate Organic Certifiers. We only bottle in glass: best for the planet, and best for maintaining maple syrup quality.
Isn’t All Maple Syrup organic?
We get this question a lot. In a nutshell: no, not all maple sap/syrup is produced organically. True, sap is organic as it leaves the tree- but it’s all in the handling as it makes its journey to syrup. This is why it’s so important to know your maple farmer or trust in certified organic,
Every impurity in the sap in concentrated at least 40x in the finished syrup. Older tubing, non schedule 40 pvc pipe, gears in the pumps delivering sap to the sugar house, anything galvanized or lead soldered, non-food-grade storage tanks, all of these can leach chemicals and heavy metals into the sap that in turn concentrate into your untested, unregulated conventional maple syrup.
Certified organic means we have a forestry stewardship plan and limit the taps on our trees to preserve tree and forest health. Organic means we only use food grade tubing and plumbing to get the sap to the evaporator and turned into maple syrup. Pure sap = pure syrup.
Our Forest is our home.
We work and live and play in our forest. We cherish and take it easy on our trees. We are conservative in our tapping- waiting until trees are at least 9-10 inches in diameter to tap- and never doing more than two taps on even the largest maples. If it looks like a tree is having a hard time- it gets retired, no taps at all. We work each year to further our forestry stewardship plan- enhancing forest health, biodiversity, and invasive species control.
The sugar Barn.
Most maple syrup makers have a sugar house or a sugar shack- we are queer in that we have a sugar barn! Modern meets classic with refinished waterproofed wood floors, a beautiful new Wisconsin-made tig-welded, wood-fired maple evaporator with concentric exhaust, and stainless bottling equipment for our multitude of glass containers. There’s even a barn playground and sensory loft for our kiddos to stay safe, busy, and regulated while Mama is working!
