Emery Farm Crafts Locally Made Maple Syrup

Over 20 years ago, Dave Emery tapped a few sugar maples in his yard on Day Street in Granby to make maple syrup with his children.  Today he taps approximately 150 sugar maples on the family's 172 acre property on Loomis Street in North Granby.

Each year when the season begins to shift and the daytime temperature begins to rise above freezing, a watery sap begins to fill the 150 buckets Dave has scattered across the Emery Farm property.  

It takes 40 gallons of raw sap from a mature sugar maple to make just one gallon of Grade A maple syrup.  Grade A syrup is made from sap that is collected early in the season, before the minerals and other stored contents are released by the tree's root stores.  Later in the season the syrup that is produced is consider dark amber, Dave explained.

Each tree, depending on size, will carry 1 or 2 taps at Emery Farm.  The Emerys won't tap a tree that is less than 8 inches in diameter, nor will they over-tap a tree.

"Dave has a deal with the trees," Jenny said.  He won't take more than the tree will give him from the taps he has so the tree will continue to have enough nutrition to continue to thrive.

"It could be compared to giving blood," Dave explained. "Most people can give a little bit of blood on a regular basis and their body will produce more -- trees are the same way."

Farms that produce maple syrup on a large scale use plastic tubing to connect multiple taps on each tree.  The tubes carry the sap to large collection containers.  The Emery Farm operation is small and uses more traditional methods.  Although historically, some farmers would cut a tree at its base and allow all the tree's sap stores to drain at once.

"That's a one-shot deal," Dave said.  That was a time when people were also harvesting trees for wood in the northeast, he explained.

Dave and Jenny Emery will spend one and one half hours collecting the sap the morning after they've had a sap-producing day. They each carry two five-gallon buckets each from tree to tree, emptying the buckets on the trees into them.  Next they carry the buckets back to their tractor and empty them into a 150 gallon container.

Once they've finished, the sap is taken to the sugar shack the Emerys built behind their home.  The sap is fed through plastic tubing through a filter and then into a wood-fired evaporator.  The evaporator has one large tank used to bring the raw sap to a boil. 

Slowly, the heated sap is drained into a second heating tank where it is boiled down even further.  Once it has reached a certain density, Dave transfers it to a large boiling pot and continues to boil it over a gas burner, giving him more control.

Once the syrup has reached the perfect density, Dave pours the boiling liquid through a double filter.  Then the finished syrup is bottled, while still hot for sanitary reasons.  

In a good year, Emery Farms will produce anywhere from 30 to 50 gallons of maple syrup.  

"You're not going to make yourself wealthy beyond your wildest dreams, at least not off 150 taps."  

If you care to try some locally made maple syrup, you can swing by Emery Farms.  If you're lucky, they might have some syrup ready to sell by mid-March.  But like anything agricultural, the weather has to cooperate first.  

"Usually by March, mid-March, I've collected enough, bottled enough to open the store," Dave said.

"If the window is open, we're open.  If the window's not open, we're not open," he said.  "That's pretty much how it goes."

If Emery Farm gets tapped out, here's some other local spots we've found for maple syrup:

• Young Farms, 5 Barndoor Hills Rd., West Granby
• Sweet Wind Farm, 339 South St., East Hartland