The Maple Diaries, 2025

Day o.o.oo.ooo

For those who have been on the sap watch over the years you will recognize this phase when….

nothing happens.

and winter decides to come back full force.

and so we wait. the more-than is so much easier when we can control it. 🙂

Day 0

we aren’t getting very far. We were all geared up to boil on this typical Quebec spring day: -20 this morning, +5 this afternoon. But the sap had other ideas. Everything is frozen – rock solid. And because the temperatures are still very cool at night, there just isn’t enough time to unfreeze the large vat enough (let alone everything else!) to boil safely. So now it’s coming in (on the ice) and will overflow… and we can’t do anything but watch. We did manage to warm the evaporator and take off a layer of ice (this is the old way of osmosis – what freezes is water and once you take that layer off, your sap is sweeter). And then we walked home…

It looks like it will start next thursday. Long winter this year… Everything here still thick with snow.

DAY 1 – ICE

It really was ICE, but we should have known it couldn’t end well, with a name like that…

It was -16 this morning, and wasn’t set to go above 0. Normally we wouldn’t boil under those conditions. The problem is that the vat (500 gallons) is full, and has been overflowing. Also, the sap is getting old – it’s been in the vat almost 2 weeks. It does keep when it’s this cold, but it’s not a good idea to keep it too long. So my plan was to boil and hopefully get to a batch, and if not, at least use some of the sap so that on Monday, when it will for sure flow, there would be room in the vat.

We went up around 11 and I made the 2 fires. But it soon became clear that things weren’t going to go our way. Everything was thick with ice: the water that we needed to wash, the extra sap in buckets in the sugar shack, the sap in the vat, the sap in the tubes… Brian worked on the valve from the large vat into the sugar shack and managed to get it open, but nothing was flowing, and without flow, you can’t boil. So, after an hour and a half, we gave up.

At home I was uneasy. I napped a bit, and weathered an intense migraine. The sun was shining intensely and I was a bit mad about the beautiful weather – feeling like I should be enjoying it but tired of this infinite cold. Enough winter already! It still wasn’t above 0.

The only thing that helps a migraine is movement, so Brian suggested I go for a walk. We decided to walk up to the maple shack to see how things were going. There was no plan to stay.

But when we got there, it was flowing (and overflowing). So I decided to try to get a batch. It was very hard: we worked for over an hour trying to get the ice out of the tubes (which was really hard since we couldn’t easily boil water since it too was frozen). Screwdrivers and hot sap and hammers and wire were used, and we thought about giving up more than once. But eventually we managed and we had flow, and the boiling began!

After another hour or so, Brian went to get food. I made 2-3 fires, cleaned things. When Brian returned things were looking good. For those in the know, we were at 3 on both thermometers. This meant we should be able to get a batch, hopefully before midnight. I also figured out a new fire technique that seemed to be working well.

And then Brian noticed that there was no more sap in the tube that shows the level. He had just been outside and everything looked fine! But now we realized that there was no more flow: it was all ice.

Of course this happened just after we made a big fire. We were going down fast in the back pan, and there was no sap. Fortunately we had frozen sap in buckets so we put the ice in (in big, bucket-shaped blocks). It was stressful but we stayed surprisingly calm.

And then I noticed that despite the fire being very low, the front pan was heating up. So I blocked it (stopping the cold sap from the back pans from getting in) and pretty quickly, with almost no wood in the fire, the temperature went up. And we got to the magic moment: curtaining, 59, 7.

And then 8, and 9.

We began to pull. What is hard, when you are getting syrup, as those who have been here know, is figuring out when to unplug the back pan (in order not to burn the front pans, which are losing liquid as you are pulling the syrup). Because we were seeing the temperature going up fast, and because we had a lot of crystallization last year (which means you have reached too high a temperature), we thought we should open up the back. We finished pulling when it reached 7 and began to bottle.

Brian said it was delicious (I am diabetic so I have to take others’ word for it). It was golden. He said it tasted intensely of maple.

We bottled – and filled more than a box: over 7 litres, almost 2 gallons, with our pretty new 500ml bottles. We were so proud! It was 9:30, we’d been there 6 hours, and we had a great first batch!

We started cleaning, getting ready to go. But then I looked at the syrup, and I thought it looked thin, so I asked Brian to taste it again. Yup, we’d let too much cold in.

So we opened up all the bottles (all the caps had stuck for once! – which was a waste of our new caps!) and put them back into the pan.

We kept 1 bottle (our taster).

ICE: a disaster.

DAY 2 – Repetition and Repetition… and Difference (Batches 2, 3, 16.5 litres / 4.36 gallons).

OOF!!!!!

So repetition and repetition finally happened. Yes, Edoardo, that first batch went back into the vat to be boiled again (and again!).

But we really did work like pros today! Just me and Brian, and 2 batches done (and cleaned up) between 1pm and 5:30! Du jamais vu!

The reason it went quickly is that the sap was already very sugary from having been boiled and boiled and boiled, over 5 false starts!

And I have to admit I am really becoming the fire sorcerer! Emma, you would be impressed! 🙂

Today was the first day with a feel of spring. Brian is still sinking in snow to his upper thighs behind the cabin, so spring is not showing itself in that regard, but the air was warm, and I walked up to the cabin without mitts! A sure sign it’s on its way (it’s supposed to snow tomorrow)!

It’s been a rough week – our chimney has decided to act up so we were 3 days without heat, which wasn’t fun. But today things turned around. I started the fire (it’s not quite fixed but we managed to get it working enough), and then we brought the truck up to the sugar shack and moved hundreds of boxes of bottles. We have enough bottles for 10 years! But it was cheaper this way (I bought palates of the two new bottles). So from now on we have 2 sizes we sell (we have more sizes for friends) – 500ml and 750ml. I will send pictures in the days to come, including our snazzy new stickers (if you were around last year you will remember the sticker saga which meant that by the end of the season every bottle had 6 stickers! not the best look…).

The two batches are dark, which means they have a more intense taste – one more sweet and the other with an over taste of vanilla, according to Brian. The darkness and deep taste comes from being boiled several times. The darker syrup is most people’s preference though there is a very strong preference for the light-coloured syrup in the market, aligned to other forms of whiteness. A recent survey showed that 99.8% of people in Quebec prefer it dark, and yet the syrup mafia continues to pay more for the light stuff (which you can really only get by having an osmosis and a vacuum (pulling sap out of trees and then reducing the water content so you boil a higher sugar sap) since it has to cook much less long. Ah, the things we do for transparency…

Well, we have the opaque stuff, and it is made with the care for a poetics of relation, so come visit and taste it for yourself and let us know what you think! If you’d like us to bottle some for you and bring it to Montreal, do let us know – we will bottle in “friend” bottles this year to save on the quite expensive labels, also with the hope of retrieving bottles (to refill them) so it’s less expensive in the long run.

Don’t forget you are more than welcome here – Mie has arranged for the house to be open through June, so there’s lots of room (except the next two weekends, which are pretty full). Still, if you want to come, we will make it work! There is also the cabin.

Thanks for sticking around for the infinite process of waiting for an update.

Batch 2: Repetition and Repetition
Batch 3: Difference

DAY 3 – CUERVO

Well, the pros arrived with the tequila – and a delicious batch!

Oana and Mie arrived last night and this morning Oana went up to check the levels and saw the vat was almost full. We figured it would be slow coming in today because it was snowing (with a mix of freezing rain) but – because this is really something you can’t predict! – it continued to flow all day. That means when we went up to boil after lunch, the vat was almost overflowing.

Dany and Monique came soon after we started, with a bottle of Cuervo from Dany’s recent trip to Mexico, so “réduit” was made (you take some hot sap that is already a bit sweet but not syrup, and you mix it with the alcohol – usually whiskey). Unsurprisingly, every time réduit gets made here, it’s either with Tequila (thanks Mayra!) or Cachaça (thanks Bianca!).

It was pretty quick again today and we just made one batch – I am not expecting much to come in today, so while the going is slow, my sense is to keep our energy and do a batch a day. Especially now that we have more hands!

There was some pretty intense stress once the batch was almost there – the fire got super hot and the back pans were too low, so the pans were super thick with syrup and I was terrified it was going to burn. But we handled it like pros, Dany standing next to the water in case he had to pour it in, Brian and Oana managing the tap and me quite frantically stirring with the large spoon to keep it from burning.

Apparently Cuervo is delicious! I will let Mie and Oana give you tasting notes!

DAY 4: PING PONG, BLOOM, GROUPUSCULE

Thank you so much for the encouragement, Lilia and Sher! I do sometimes worry it might be aggravating to get these updates! But the anarchival force in me wants not so much the archive but all that moves between, which is what gets me writing after a long day of boiling (or not, because as you know, it’s either nothing or everything).

So we are in the everything stage. We boiled and boiled today but barely made a dent in the sap. And tomorrow I head to Montreal for the last classes and a doctor’s appointment with Remi, which means the team here is stuck with the too-muchness! There is no pressure to boil (it’s a sport!) so these may simply be cleaning days with some side evaporation (just bringing the level of sap down). Or it may be that there is no boiling at all, that everyone takes a much needed break before the madness: from next thursday until it ends, I expect we will be in non-stop overflow! And the ending doesn’t seem near – we still have lots of snow on the ground and there are no signs of buds (which mark the turn in the sap to what we here call “sève,” the “turned” white-ish sap).

Mia and Oana were amazing today! There is a lot to watch for, and as we learn we are constantly tweaking our techniques. We are twice as fast as we used to be – and now our concern isn’t for that damn last degree (which I am sure some of you remember not so fondly!) but for the overreach – we got as high as 16 today (which is 219+8, so 227 degrees fahrenheit, ie TOO HOT). [I am a metric person but these thermometers are all in fahrenheit].

The first two batches were STRESSFUL! For both of them the pans had only a few millimeters of liquid and it was turning to “tire” – the thick viscous taffy-like maple deliciousness. But not what you want in an enormous evaporator with a fire over 1000 degrees (fahrenheit). Everyone handled it beautifully and as it ended (all ok!) we thought about what we could do differently next time. And then it happened AGAIN! I think one of the main challenges is that we have been testing the sap with the densimeter (it needs to be at 59 density, whatever that means) before starting to get it out. But by the time it’s there, it’s going over the temperature in the front pan, so it’s not moving (not enough liquid). So for the last batch: groupuscule (we had been talking about microfascism and the group subject!), we did it the old-fashioned way only, using the spoon and watching it “curtain.” Brian was also opening and closing the valve and Mia and Oana were on the back pans. It was a big, beautiful batch! (not fascist at all!)

So far the syrup has been very dense and dark. Early syrup tends toward darkness – it’s a question of minerals and also the degree of sugar in the early sap – and this is beautiful, golden-brown viscous deliciousness. The last batch was amber, a bit thinner and Brian and Mie’s favourite of the day. Sadly Oana was saddled with a headache and bad cold, tastebuds not at the ready, so she will have to taste it in the days to come.

Thank you so much, Oana and Mie! What a joy to work together!

DAY 5: It turns out you can’t bottle process.

After a few days teaching my last classes in Montreal, I returned to beautiful, clean pans and an overflowing vat. This morning Brian and I went up around 9 and soon thereafter Oana and Peng joined us. We had our past ICE problem to solve – we had forgotten to uncouple the tube from the vat to the  sugar shack, so everything was thick with ice. It’s a long and frustrating process of boiling water and trying to melt the ice inside the tubes. Brian worked hard on it outside while Oana chipped away at the ice inside, and Peng brought kettles of boiling water back and forth. Over a few hours it was all unmelted. In the meantime, the fires were going softly (because we can’t be at full roar if we don’t have sap coming in). Mia then joined us and we had a really good team. I had decided I was going to go full-dictator, so I gave  people stations and told them they had to keep things going at their post. I even made Brian and Peng perform a bit for me. Until Brian asked me if I was dictator-for-a-day, which I thought sounded pretty alluring, and then told me I was Trump. After that I kept a few dictatorial tendencies in check, though I was still pretty bossy.

The first batch we made, curtain, is a STAR. Everyone agreed it was their favourite yet. It’s gold-coloured, with complex undertones, sweet but not too sweet. It was a big batch! And it came without too much stress – which is always nice (a bit of stress is just par for the course with such a hot fire).

Then we prepared for sweetspot, which came to Mia upon realizing that she and Peng were really managing the sap levels well (it’s been a challenge because the float wasn’t working well, but it seems Brian has got it working!). Sweetspot is sweet, a little less complex than curtain, and more viscous.

We were getting tired and so I suggested we make only one last batch (we have enough sap to go all night). And then Mia said she had a name for the next one: process!

Everything was looking good, both front pans were bubbling well, and we were keeping up our energy with some salt and vinegar chips (which I believe is Brian’s favourite part of mapleing, since chips only come into his life at the sugarshack!). The thermometers were going up well, and all was set. We started to let the sap flow into the large syrup vat (from which we bottle) and then suddenly the temperature started going up too fast. Brian and Oana, who were at the vat, noticed that the spout was not allowing much liquid through, and where I was I noticed that I was having trouble moving the less hot liquid into the front pans. It was 12 then 15 then 19 degrees and suddenly the pans were burning. Fortunately we moved quickly, turning off the spout and throwing water (thanks Oana!) into the front pans. We had some syrup in the vat so once we had stabilized the situation, we started bottling. Unfortunately, the verdict was that it wasn’t good enough – had a strange before-taste.

So, as I said, it turns out you can’t bottle process…

Tomorrow, after we scrub the pans, we will put it back in and start the process again.