Spring was in the air in Hanmer on March 31, as maple lovers from across Greater Sudbury headed to Maple Hill Farm for a Taffy Tasting Weekend.
Featuring maple taffy, face-painting, a chance to pet miniature horses and an Easter egg hunt, the event was filled with very happy and very sticky children.
Maple Hill Farm was once known as the “Despatie Maple Farm – La ferme Despatie”.
Though the first sugar shack (cabane à sucre) was built on the property in 1916, it was in the mid 1950s that the 35-acre property was purchased by Lucien and Alice Despatie and, in 1967, they began to commercialize syrup products and to host large public events, school tours and horse-drawn sleigh rides during the winter. A newer sugar shack was built in the 1970s for production as well as for public demonstrations.
Taffy-tasting parties like the one held this weekend were hosted on the property until 2014 and again for a final year in 2017, 50 years after syrup production first began at this site.
Céline and Michel Larivière began Maple Hill Farm in June 2017.
Trevor Johnston, product specialist, offered a tour of the syrup-making process.
The 35 acres of land is filled with tubes running to a pump house. When the tank in the pump house is full, the sap makes its way up to the holding tank before the sap is measured for its sugar content.
“Right now there's about 2.5-per-cent sugar in the sap,” said Johnston. “So we'll run it through a reverse osmosis system and concentrate it to about 12 per cent, just so that it takes less time and would boil it.”
That concentrated sugar water is then pumped into the upper area of the sugar shack, then gravity fed back into the evaporator, which sits on top of a wood-burning fire.
“Right now we're running at about 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.”
The sugar water will continue on the evaporator until it’s dense enough to move through the tubes.
“Then what ends up in the front is mostly syrup,” said Johnston. That’s when the syrup’s sugar content is tested again, aiming for 66.9 percent sugar.
Once they’ve reached that, Johnston adds diatomaceous earth to bind to any of the sugar sand or other particulates, then puts it through a filter press.
“Then we pump it into barrels and then we'll pump it into the bottling unit into bottles and then people can pump it on pancakes,” said Johnston.
You can find more information about Maple Hill Farm here.
Jenny Lamothe is a reporter at Sudbury.com.
