"The Shack"

On Saturday, we drove out to the "Sap Shack Bros." maple syrup farm, north of Colfax. Chris's friend K and his brother have been making maple syrup for four years now. This has been a good year for maple sap.

The boys told me that as of Saturday, they had collected 900 gallons of sap and have cooked down 30 quarts of maple syrup, which they had already canned into the wee hours of Friday night.

Here's a picture of their large stainless steel tank that holds all the sap, which is being heated by the wood burner below. You can see the plastic hose which feeds the sap into the tank. As the sap cooks and boils, more sap is added, and that's why it takes so long to cook the sap down to syrup consistency. This process can take days.

Here is an additional stainless tank with sap that was ready to be cooked. After collecting the sap from the trees, they can only cook so much at a time, so this is kind of like the holding tank which is located behind the shack. This particular sap was several days old.

Of course, all shacks come with an old dog. I don't remember this fellows name, but he was a good mellow dog. When we arrived, he was sleeping on the floor of the shack. With the wood fire heating the sap, it was nice and cozy in the shack.

Here's a picture of Chris's friend K, showing me his tanks on the four-wheeler. This is how he collects the sap from the maple trees. What is most interesting is that this is a small business run by two young brothers! I am so impressed by their hard work. They don't advertise their maple syrup, but just sell by word of mouth.

Before we came home yesterday I bought two quarts of fresh maple syrup...$10/quart. So how much did Chris cook up yesterday? He ended up yielding 3 quarts of maple syrup. Not bad.

On a final note, we woke up to 4 inches of wet heavy snow this morning...oh yippee! It stayed cool and very windy today.