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Turning sap to syrup at Audubon

Turning sap to syrup at Audubon

Guests learned how to make maple syrup March 16.

Patrick L. Sullivan

SHARON — Visitors to Sharon Audubon Center in Sharon Saturday, March 16, took walking tours, stocked up on baked treats, and got a look at how maple syrup is made.

Wendy Miller, who is the education program manager at Sharon Audubon, was alone in the sugar shack waiting for the first group of visitors.

She fed logs into the large, wood-fired apparatus and asked a visitor, “Is it steamy enough in here?”

It was. The first group filed in, blinking a bit at the clouds of fragrant steam issuing from the bubbling sap.

Miller explained how maple sap is turned into maple syrup. It takes roughly 40 gallons of sap to get a gallon of syrup, she explained: “All we need to do is boil it. It turns into syrup by itself.”

The goal is to get the sap, which is 3% sugar, to turn into syrup — at 67% sugar — so the sugarers need to be on their toes.

If it boils too long, the result is solid and granular, definitely palatable but not practical if you’re thinking about pouring it on pancakes or waffles.

When the syrup reaches a temperature of 219 degrees Fahrenheit, it is almost finished. A hydrometer is then used to determine the sugar content.

If that is satisfactory, the almost-syrup is processed through a press that has seven filters, to remove what is known as “sugar sand” — minerals, mostly, plus any bugs that eluded previous screenings.

Patrick L. Sullivan
Senior Reporter
Patrick Sullivan has been a reporter for The Lakeville Journal since 2004, covering everything from town meetings to local characters and the outdoors. He grew up in Northern Virginia but spent summers on Mount Riga in Salisbury, giving him a lifelong connection to the Northwest Corner. A graduate of Denison University, Patrick is also the author of Tangled Lines, the newspapers’ popular fly-fishing column—making The Lakeville Journal, as far as anyone knows, the only newspaper in Connecticut with a regular fly-fishing columnist. He once received a fan letter from England, which he considers sufficient evidence that his work has achieved international acclaim.

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