Nearly 100 of the state’s maple syrup producers from Aroostook to York County opened their doors for the 35th Maine Maple Sunday.
Back Ridge Sugar House in Winterport was bustling Sunday morning as people jockeyed for parking spots along Boston Road and and skirted mud puddles to get inside the wooden building where the evaporator was steaming up the windows.
David Peckham came from his home in Bar Harbor to purchase syrup and maple-flavored popcorn. Peckham, who described his age as “65 plus,” remembers making syrup on his grandmother’s oil-fired stove in Northeast Harbor as a boy.
“I tapped the trees around my grandmother’s house,” he said. “We didn’t use tubing in those days. We collected the sap in buckets and hand carried it to the stove. We used to put the syrup over snow and eat it like ice cream. It sure was good.”
University of Maine student Sierra Yost, 19, of Windham has gone to a local sugar shack with her family every maple Sunday. She went to the Winterport operation this year with two friends.
“The best part is the maple popcorn and the candy,” she said, holding up a small bag that held her purchases.
Yost is such a maple Sunday regular that she knew it takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.
Back Ridge Sugar House owner Josh Knipping started in 2008 by tapping 10 trees and boiling the sap into syrup using a metal pot designed to deep fry a turkey. This year, he had 600 taps and a professional evaporator that can handle 100 gallons of sap and produce two gallons of syrup an hour.
Knipping plans to expand his sugar house this summer so it can accomodate more customers during the sugaring season. He also wants to increase his number of taps to between 1,000 and 1,500.
While Knipping was explaining how maple syrup is made at his sugar shack,Tony Couture, who runs the family-owned Maple Valley Farms in Jay, was doing the same thing 100 miles west of Winterport. C.J. King, owner of Maple Moose operation in Easton, led “tap to tree” tours on his property in Aroostook County.
Couture said his operation has about 2,800 taps and has produced about 415 gallons of syrup since the second week of February, when the season started. He also said the sugar content of the sap is high this year, meaning he’s been able to get a gallon of syrup from 30 to 32 gallons of sap, an unusually high yield.
“The sugar content varies year to year based on the nutrients in the ground and the the amount of precipitation — there are a lot of factors that play into it,” Couture said at his farm’s spacious and bustling sugar shack early Sunday afternoon.
Gov. Paul LePage on Tuesday tapped a maple tree on the grounds of the Blaine House to promote Maine Maple Sunday. He said that the industry is growing in output and importance, although it still is third in the nation behind Vermont and New York.
Production increased 5 percent last year, over 2016, to 709,000 gallons from 1.89 million taps, LePage said in a news release. The industry’s annual contribution to the Maine economy is $48.7 million with 805 full- and part-time jobs.
BDN writer Seth Koenig and Presque Isle Star-Herald writer Melissa Lizotte contributed to this report.
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