Spring Activities
Pure Maple Syrup the Natural, Nutritious, & Delicious Sweetener!
Visit Ioka Valley Farm’s Sugar House and watch the fascinating process of turning Fresh Maple Sap into Pure Maple Syrup! Come, talk to a real sugarmaker and ask your maple questions during the maple sugaring season. Come see our sugarhouse and taste the sweet results! Ioka Valley Farm’s Sugar House is open to visitors whenever we are boiling, mid-February through early April. Weekend Sugar House Tours & Tastings, mid February - the first weekend in April!
Maple Facts
Rob and his wife, Missy, revived the art of maple sugaring here at Ioka Valley Farm in 1992 with 13 taps and the kitchen stove. Today, we have 14,000 taps in the sugarbush behind our sugarhouse and lease another 4000 taps on another property. The flavor of our maple syrup comes from the fertile soils of the Berkshires.
All taps are on our pipeline tubing system using vacuum to promote maximum sap yield. The sap is first collected in our storage tanks. Sap comes into the releaser where the sap is released from the vacuum and pumped into our tanks. Our tubing system enables our sap to only be in contact with food grade or stainless steel materials throughout the entire production process.
Before we boil our sap we use reverse osmosis which is a filtration system that separates the pure water molecules one way and the larger sugar molecules the other. This brings our raw sap from 2% sugar content to a concentrate sap of about 15% sugar content. This is a HUGE energy saving step. We use a lot less oil (or wood) to boil our syrup.
Two modern boilers housed in the sugarhouse especially for the production of this sweet treat. Our small evaporator is a 2 X 6 wood fired evaporator that boils 50 gallons/hour. So with raw 2% sap it would make just over 1 gallon/hour. With the sap concentrated to 15% sugar concentration this evaporator would make over 8 gallons/hour.
Our large evaporator is a 5 X 16 oil fired evaporator that boils over 600 gallons/hour. So with raw 2% sap it would make just over 14 gallons/hour and with the sap concentrated to 15% sugar concentration is would make just over 100 gallons/hour.
When boiling maple syrup we know we have made maple syrup by watching the temperature and the density. Maple syrup is made at 7 ½ degrees Fahrenheit above the boiling point of water, which is around 217 degrees Fahrenheit depending on the day’s atmospheric pressure. The density is also checked for a final check which is measured in Brix. Hot maple syrup is 66.9 Brix for correct density.
We then filter our maple syrup through a filter press to remove the sugarsand. Sugarsand is the mineral deposits as a result of the evaporation process of boiling approximately 40 gallons down to 1 gallon of finished product. We do use the sugarsand from the filter press in the manure and spread it on the fields as fertilizer
As we make our maple syrup we filter and can our maple syrup into 40 gallon barrels for ease of storage. We will repack our maple syrup fresh throughout the year into smaller resale containers as needed.
We tap both hard and soft maple trees. We follow best management practices in forest management and sugaring guidelines. Our trees are 9 inches in diameter (making them approximately 40 years old) before we begin tapping them. When they reach 15 inches or more in diameter we will place 2 taps on that tree. With each tap we average approximately ⅓ of a gallon of finished maple syrup.
Our farm family continues to work hard at keeping our farm beautiful, productive, and to make our products to the highest quality possible now and for generations to come.
