Page 6 - BusinessWest February 17, 2025

The Williams Farm Sugarhouse has been at its current location along Route 5 since 1994.
Staff Photo
make up on the other end.”
When tapping a sugar maple, it’s best to drill a taphole that can
provide an ample amount of sap while maintaining the long-term health and sap production of the tree. In a good year, one tap can yield around 10 gallons of sap, or almost one quart of syrup. Sap is, on average, about 2% sugar, and it takes about 45 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.
The traditional method of gathering sap is to hang four-gallon
They always try to boil on weekends so the visiting public can witness the process, although, because sap flow is so dependent on the weather, they can’t guarantee they will be boiling on any given day, so for customers who want
to see the process, it’s best to
call ahead or check the website
buckets below the tap to catch the drip. The pro- cess is very labor-intensive, and buckets must be gathered and emptied up to once a day. The Wil- liams Farm enterprise hangs about 3,000 buckets each season, tapping more than 1,000 trees in Deerfield and Sunderland.
A less labor-intensive way of collecting sap is through a tubing pipeline, which utilizes gravity to gather sap into holding tanks that are positioned lower than the trees or at a slope. While the initial cost of setting up lines is greater than that of buck- ets, once lines are established, they can hold for 15 to 20 years. The farm has about 1,000 taps on pipelines, but is looking to expand that number in the future.
As noted earlier, the sap gathered from a sugar maple tree is not the same as what’s poured on pancakes. Sap has a large concentration of water and a small concentration of sugar, and the addi- tional water must be boiled off in an evaporator.
In the sugarhouse, sap is continuously fed into the evaporator, where it flows through a series of troughs. The sap is boiling the entire time, and when it reaches the proper density at 219 degrees,
it can then be called syrup. The more water that is boiled away from the syrup, the thicker it gets. Products like maple cream, candy, hard blocks, and granulated sugar are all made by further reducing the syrup at higher temperatures.
Williams noted that the team starts boiling as soon as they begin to get sap into the sugarhouse, and the sap is processed at its fresh- est in order to ensure the highest-quality syrup.
“When we’re boiling, we invite people to come back and ask questions, and we’ll explain the process. It’s really interesting to get people’s feedback — a lot of people have no idea how you even start making maple syrup.”
Sugar
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Continued on page 25
“We appreciate the Thunderbirds commitment to the Greater Springfield area and are proud to join the organization in honoring deserving individuals and groups in the local community.”
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FEBRUARY 17, 2025
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