40-to-1

That little one-quart jug of sweet maple syrup sitting on your breakfast table may seem simply sweet, but the process of turning sap into syrup is fairly involved….

It takes about 40 gallons of sap from a sugar maple tree to produce one gallon of maple syrup – that means ten gallons of sap goes into every quart jug you pour over your pancakes or waffles.

The sap-to-syrup process starts when sugar makers tap the trees, as the cold days of winter start to warm toward spring. The sap is collected in buckets or plastic tubing and transported to the sugar house. There, the clear sap (it looks like water when it flows from the tree) is boiled continuously until it thickens into syrup.

To find out more about how maple syrup is made, visit the New Hampshire Maple Experience site.

The Maple Experience at The Rocks Estate: Making Syrup - Preserving History

The New Hampshire Maple Experience museum is housed in a century-old building at the picturesque and historic Rocks Estate in Bethlehem. The Rocks is now the North Country Conservation & Education Center for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. It is also a working farm, where Christmas trees are grown to be harvested during the winter holiday season and maple trees are tapped in the spring to create sweet maple syrup.

Visitors to The Rocks are invited to participate in the maple sugaring process during the season, from mid-March to early April. (Don’t worry – if you miss the sugaring season, the N.H. Maple Experience also offers tours during the summer and fall months. )

The 1906 building housing the N.H. Maple Experience was originally used as a sawmill and pigpen on the Estate. Today it houses an interactive maple museum, where sugar makers boil sap into syrup during the season. On display are sugaring artifacts, from the collection of locally renowned sugar maker Charlie Stewart, offering insight to how the process of crafting sweet maple syrup has evolved over the years.