WATERFORD — As the pale, watery sun of late winter begins to warm a few days above freezing, while the nights remain crisply cold, the sap begins to rise in sugar maple trees, bringing maple syrup season to life. For the next few weeks, while temperatures continue to veer between 20 degree nights and 40 degree days, the Brown family will rush to make a year’s worth of syrup production at Bonhomie Acres on Quaker Road, just outside of Waterford in Middlebury Township, right along the North Branch of the Kokosing River. It’s nothing new to the Browns.
“I’m the third generation,” said Bill Brown, “And the fourth generation’s the one running it, now.” He referred to his son, Dan, who was busily firing up the boiling pan in the sugar house in order to get some syrup made. Son Kelly Brown, familiar from the Owl Creek Produce Auction as well as years of service on the Fredericktown school board, also helps run the place. Bill has retired now and mainly restricts himself to overseeing, advising and giving tours to customers who want to get a better idea how tasty syrup is made from watery tree sap.
A number of trees near the driveway into the farm are decorated with old-fashioned collection buckets, but the real collecting is done in the modern manner, with vacuum-pumped tubing running about a half-mile from the surrounding woods into a pump house, which sends the sap to a 2,000-gallon underground collection tank tucked into the hillside behind the sugar house. About 1,000 of the 5,000 taps which the Browns run are at Bonhomie Acres. Another 4,000 taps are run from rented land in nearby woods into large collection tanks which are gathered with the help of a large flatbed truck and brought back to the evaporator.
When the sap is first run into the sugar shack, it goes into a reverse osmosis machine which squeezes out water, increasing the sap’s sugar content from 2 percent to 8 percent. From there it runs into a bulk tank immediately behind the shack, which feeds it into the evaporator. In the past, the Browns’ evaporator was wood-fired, but as Bill Brown explained, the current fuel-oil heating system stabilized the process.
“We’d loose a lot of heat opening the doors to add wood to the fire,” Brown said. Now they can maintain a steady temperature and a consistent rate of evaporation. As water is steamed away, syrup flows into finishing pans at the end of the evaporator. When the temperature approaches the ideal level, a hydrometer is inserted into the syrup to determine the density of syrup required for commercial production.
From the finishing pans, the syrup drains into buckets, at a rate of up to 15 gallons per hour. From the buckets, it is run through a filter press which removes solid particulate matter.
“It has no value of any kind,” Brown said, holding up a bottle full of gray sludge, “So we simply throw it away after it’s been filtered from the syrup.”
After filtering, the syrup is bottled into individual and family-sized plastic jugs, or into barrels for commercial distribution. Bonhomie Acres’ syrup is distributed and sold throughout northern and central Ohio, with a large portion being sold directly from the farm and at farmers markets in the area.
Brown explained that sap gathered early in the season becomes “light amber” syrup when it is boiled down. As the season goes on, the syrup becomes darker, with a stronger maple flavor, until by the end of the season, “dark amber” is reached. Brown said the balanced “medium amber” is the most popular with customers. He added that the very darkest syrup, at the tail-end of the season, is reduced down to a grade-B syrup and sold to commercial producers for combining with corn syrup to make imitation syrups billed as “maple-flavored.”
Ohio typically ranks around fourth in maple syrup production in the United States, though, according to Brown, the Canadian province of Ontario itself produces more maple syrup than all the other states and provinces combined. One of the great unknowns about every syrup season is whether or not it will turn out to be a good year. There are no advance signs. Only once the season is finished will producers know what kind of year 2008’s season will have been.
“Ask me after April first,” Brown said.
