Create memories that last a lifetime

As a young boy growing up in the Province of Quebec it was an annual tradition for my family to visit the local "Cabane à sucre" (sugar shack) each spring. We would follow the various trails through the maple forest as the kids in the group scattered in all directions to see how much sap was in each bucket. Eventually we would find ourselves back at the sugar shack watching as the sap was unloaded from the collection barrel before heading indoors to warm up. Inside there was a very large wood-fired evaporator filled with boiling sap. You could see how it slowly darkened from clear liquid to maple syrup as it flowed from pan to pan. There would usually be a few family members tending to the syrup or loading wood into the evaporator but there always seemed to be a true sugar maker overseeing it all. He was easy to pick out with his grey hair and old tattered flannel shirt and by the way he continually skimmed, measured, tested, and even tasted the syrup before draining some into a large barrel for canning later on. To this day I still remember my first experience at a sugarbush near Valcartier, Quebec - I was three years old at the time.

Fast-forward some 40+ years and things have changed. As with most farming, "economics of scale" play a big part in being profitable and equipment has advanced in order to make it manageable. The aluminum sap buckets we all recognize have been replaced with plastic tubing measured in miles, collection barrels have been replaced with automated pumping stations, sap is condensed using reverse osmosis, plus modern evaporators are often oil fired and usually completely enclosed. Visit a commercial high volume sugarbush today and it's very likely you will never even see the sap or syrup other than in the gift shop.

What we have done at Stonebriar Farm is to recreate days gone by and the whole family experience of sugar making. We've ordered up modern equipment but had it reverse engineered to our specifications allowing for small batch production, we've collected equipment and supplies no longer manufactured, and we conduct all of our boiling in the great outdoors. To put it another way, we've turned maple syrup back into a family experience.

Please note the images on this page were not taken at Stonebriar Farm.
They are simply to illustrate times-gone-by in the maple industry.