South Village Sugarhouse    

We are a small, family owned and operated sugarhouse in North Central Massachusetts.  This year will be our 5th season making 100% pure Massachusetts maple syrup. 

The maple bug bit me about 25 years ago.  When I was younger, we would go to our neighbor's sugarhouse next door to watch them boil and buy some syrup.  When I was a little older, I would help them "pick" buckets and bring the sap to the sugarhouse.  This is when I began paying close attention to the process to learn the ins and outs of making syrup.  Over ten years ago, my neighbors stopped making syrup due to other obligations.

Six years ago, 2 friends of mine took the plunge and built a sugarhouse and bought an evaporator after making syrup on a woodstove outside the year before.  That year, I borrowed some buckets from my neighbor to tap trees on my property to collect sap and bring it to their sugarhouse for boiling.  After a season of helping them, I started looking for some sugaring equipmnent in hopes of starting my own operation.

In April 2007, I was able to find some used sugaring equipment for sale in Vermont.  I purchased a 2X6 Leader Drop Flue Evaporator, a 7" Short Bank Filter Press, a canning tank and burner for bottling syrup, 2 300-gallong galvanized holding tanks, 50 or so buckets, covers and spiles, a few rolls of 5/16" tubing and some mainline along with hydrometers and some other miscellaneous sugaring necessities.  All this came before I even broke ground on a sugarhouse.  So the push was on to work all winter to build a sugarhouse that we could work in.

We began building our sugarhouse in October 2007 and worked through the winter framing and preparing for the sugaring season in 2008.  We finished the metal roofing just in time to install the smoke stack and start boiling.  In 2008 we collected sap from 88 taps - all buckets.  My neighbors were nice enough to let me borrow their buckets (and allowed me to tap some of their Sugar Maples).  Another friend also allowed us to tap some trees on his property.  In all, 1,300 gallons of sap was collected and boiled down to make about 30 gallons of syrup.  It was a great first year for us! As you can see from the photos, the kids are always eager to help collect sap and make syrup!

We made some improvements for the 2009 sugaring season.  We had 153 taps for the 2009 season.  We added a wood shed to the back of the sugarhouse for easy access to wood for feeding the evaporator and added a blower for forced draft on the evaporator that gave us a 20% increase in the evaporation rate.  A friend and fellow sugarer helped us to obtain a new (to us) stainless steel feed tank for the evaporator.  We also purchased a larger canning tank to handle a larger volume of syrup prior to bottling.

We added quite a few taps for the 2010 season.  That year we had 225 taps in 3 locations - 50 on buckets and the rest on gravity tubing.  We tapped February 19th to catch the early sap run.  It is a good thing that we tapped early, as the season was worse than expected.  We only made about 1/3 to 1/2 of the syrup we expected to make that year.

For 2011 we lost some trees we used to tap, but we added gravity tubing to a new sugarbush.  The total tap count that year was 320.  We started tapping on Valentines Day and finished on February 16th to catch the first sap run.  Ideal weather conditions made this a banner year for many sugarmakers.

The 2012 season is off to an early start.  With above average temperatures throughout the winter and mild temps early in the season, it will be interesting to see how much syrup will be made this year.