Thompson's Tree Farm Maple Weekend Open House Shows Melding of Traditional and Modern Syrup Making

As I walked into the wood sugarhouse at Thompson's Tree Farm, two things struck me - the airy feel of the large space and the rich aroma of burning wood and boiling maple sap.

This was my third sugarhouse to visit on my self-routed tour covering seven sugarhouses in two weekends, March 21-22 and March 28-29 in St. Lawrence County, New York, as part of the 14th Annual New York Maple Weekend.

The building felt spacious because the tall structure soars to the rafters and has generous space around the huge evaporator. And unlike any other sugarhouse I visited, they were burning wood, not oil, to fuel the evaporator. The fragrance was wonderful!

Doug Thompson and his new bride June Dewhirst head up this operation. Doug's mother and father, who are near 90 years old, are his business partners and still live in the main farmhouse a short distance from the sugarhouse. Doug is a sixth generation maple syrup producer.

During syrup-making time, an Amish teen helps six days a week and Doug also has an Amish neighbor on call for two or three days a week. Today, he has three helpers - a nephew, his friend, and one of his sap suppliers.

This sugarhouse is newly built, erected in 2008. Doug owns a sawmill, so when he decided to build a new sugarhouse, he used all his own trees for wood. The slabs off those logs are piled high outside the sugarhouse and Doug noted that they would supply two-thirds of the wood he'll burn for this year's syrup making.

Doug started tapping on March 3 and fired up his first boil on March 7. His first run was 1,350 gallons of sap. Doug's goal for 2009 is to produce 1,000 gallons of syrup. It was about 2:00 PM on March 22 when I visited and he was at 435 gallons with the expectation of finishing the day at 450 gallons of syrup. As sap only flows when night temperatures are freezing and days are below zero, the season may only last until mid-April

While he kept an eye on the boiling sap and fed the fire, Doug explained his operation.

The Thompson family settled in this area in 1809 when Doug's great, great, great grandfather purchased a farm down the road. In 1828, the family acquired the present 600-acre farm. The Thompsons have been tapping maple trees here for 150 years.

Up until seven years ago, the Thompsons did all their sap collection with buckets. Now Doug has switched to the plastic tubing method.

He used 35,000 feet of blue plastic tubing on a vacuum system to tap the trees. Those lines feed into 26,000 feet of mainline tubing that brings the raw sap to a gas-powered pump station tank on a trailer in the meadow. Doug has a team of draft horses that go into the sugar bush to haul the sap in to his syrup making operation. He notes that by using horses he is able to utilize Amish workers.

Doug said that compared to the bucket method, tubes required half the size hole drilled into the tree and caused half the damage over time. He pointed out that with the tubes, he could drill higher on the trees, above the old holes. With a grin Doug noted that if he did that with buckets, he'd most likely be wearing the sap trying to get the buckets down.

Another advantage is that Doug can collect the sap using only one man, whereas with the buckets he needed five or six hired men.

Doug placed 2,900 taps this year - breaking his previous record of 1,500 taps. He notes that his sugar bush has the potential to handle 4,000 taps. Doug also purchases sap from other sources. This year he is processing syrup from about 4,000 taps.

After the sap reaches the tank in the former milk house, it is pumped into the Reverse Osmosis machine, also housed there.

This milk house is connected to a huge old dairy barn, just a short distance from the sugarhouse. Doug sold his herd, so the barn no longer houses cows. Outside the milk house is a tank where suppliers deliver their sap. Doug can measure and test for sugar content before processing.

Doug paid $15,000 for his Reverse Osmosis (RO) machine and assembled it himself. That was rather a feat of genius in my opinion, as he showed the crudely hand-drawn assembly instructions the salesman gave him! Part of the system is the $1800 membrane that filters sap. It cannot freeze, so Doug has three electric heaters in the milk house that run at night to keep the system operating.

Doug admits it was a challenge to assemble this system, but well worth it. The RO has the capability to process 600 gallons of sap per hour and removes 80% of the water in the sap. The RO runs on electricity and stops automatically when it runs out of sap. The RO method has saved Doug 75% of the wood and time he formerly used without it.

The water that the RO eliminates from the sap is very pure, and Doug collects it and uses it to wash the membrane filters.

From here, the sap is pumped through tubing to the head tank located on a floor above the sugarhouse. Doug has three pumps in the milk house running for four to six hours a day.

In the head tank, the sap is cold to prevent bacteria from growing. Then by gravity, it flows from the bottom of the head tank down to the evaporator. Doug has a sight gauge located near the ceiling of the sugarhouse where the head tank outlet is so that he can see from the sugarhouse floor how much sap is in the head tank above.

The evaporator is a system of pans that keep the boiling sap on the move through this maze-like phase until it reaches the final outlet spout, at which point it is syrup. It's collected and brought over to the filtering part of the sugarhouse floor.

The boiling is carefully watched and Doug noted that feeding wood is somewhat of an art to keep the temperature and boil at the right point. When the boil gets too high, he adds a touch of cream - that fat content reduces the boil.

After the sap is boiled to syrup, it is put through a filter press fueled by propane. The waffle-like frames use filter paper and food-grade diatomaceous earth mixed with syrup to filter out the 'niter' - or 'sugar sand' - which is a sediment that will make the syrup cloudy later if not removed. The diatomaceous earth is a white powder, essentially made of ground fossils, which goes through the filter press and coats the filters so that the niter adheres to the paper.

Doug showed me what the used filter papers look like - they are brown and caked with dark brown diatomaceous earth, revealing the niter that was removed. He noted that the filter press method, which utilizes pressure, filters four times the amount he was able to filter in the same amount of time using the old 'felt filter' drip method, which does not use pressure.

After the syrup is filtered, it is sealed in drums for commercial use or 'canned' in jugs for retail sales. The canner is propane-fueled and heats the syrup to 180 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit to create a sterile 'hot pack' in the plastic jugs.

A gallon of syrup weighs 11 pounds, and the commercial drums hold 600 pounds of syrup. This syrup is used by packagers elsewhere to be rebottled, or used in other products such as maple glaze and flavoring. Doug noted that in the 1930s, maple syrup was used in chewing tobacco.

Prices for retail syrup jugs are posted on the sugarhouse wall. Doug sells his syrup for $40 per gallon, and sizes range down from quarts and pints to the smallest 3.4-ounce jug at $2.50. His retail operation is upstairs. It is accessible via a concrete ramp from the sugarhouse floor, or by doors from the outside that are at ground level.

In the retail shop, visitors were given bags of maple syrup-coated popcorn, which is delicious, and a wonderful bookmark that also serves as the Thompson's business card - complete with a recipe for Sally Thompson's Maple Short Cake.

The aroma of this fragrant sugarhouse at Thompson's Tree Farm clung to my hair and clothes, and filled my car with the lovely aroma that lingered for the rest of the day. It's a wonderful soft, rich, creamy scent!

I was extremely grateful to Doug for the time he took to explain the operation in detail and show me each element of it. He is an excellent teacher and significant source of historical facts on maple sugaring.