(upbeat banjo music)
- [Announcer] Today we're at a sugar shack
outside of Goshen, Vermont.
Here at the Republic of Vermont,
they take the sap from maple trees
and turn it into the delicious maple syrup
that hits your table.
We are gonna be tapping some trees,
collecting sap and boiling it down to syrup
to see how modern syrup makers take those maple trees
in their backyard and put them on your pancakes.
(upbeat banjo music)
- My name's Ethan West, I run Republic of Vermont
with my wife and Annina and our two little babies.
My son is obsessed with syrup
it was one of his first words, "Ma-Pa-Pa."
We built this facility.
We built the sugar house, my friend and I built it
with some help from the family, in 2015.
Traditionally you'll see buckets hanging on trees
to collect sap.
That works fine, we just have a more efficient system,
at a commercial scale, where we run plastic tubing
through the woods, food-grade tubing.
For this particular sugar bush
there are 1500 or 2000 trees.
All together we tap 7,000 trees.
- We're collecting that at every tree
from just this one little spout.
So from each tree, you only take just a little bit of sap
and ideally you're drilling a hole.
You know, there's one here,
you're drilling it down two inches
and over two inches.
So that you're not drilling all the holes
on one side of the tree and eventually damaging it.
So you want to slowly circle around it
so that by the time you get back to the front,
you know it's pretty much healed up.
And so this one hole's taking just a little bit of sap
and collecting it with all the rest of the trees
that are hooked up to these lines.
This big one here is a sap line.
What connects to this big line
are these smaller lines called main lines.
These are all numbered and have pressure gauges on them.
Off of each of these main lines come multiple lateral lines
and each of these lateral lines connect to the tree
and these black lines here,
at least this one, is the vacuum line.
So that's where the air pressure runs up
and pressurizes from the sugar house
and pressurizes the hole.
The sap is running down this
because there's a vacuum pump at the sugar house.
A vacuum that's pulling all of the sap downwards, downhill.
- It allows this app to move from smaller tubes
from tree down to bigger main lines
and then the main lines run down to our holding tanks.
(upbeat music)
We have about 12,000 gallons worth of storage.
12,000 gallons
would be about a 200 gallons of syrup, roughly.
From our holding tanks,
it runs through a reverse osmosis system
which basically is a set of filters.
It takes the sugar content from 2% up to about 16%.
At that point, it enters the evaporator where we heat it
under a lot of heat and it caramelizes
and gets the really nice flavor.
We burn these high-heat wood pellets.
They're soft wood.
They burn really, really hot, really, really fast.
And we have about 10 tons of them in a silo out back.
And they're fed in through this giant PVC pipe
with an auger.
And then we fill the small bin
and then a second auger is set to carry the pellets
right into the fire box.
So it feeds into the evaporator at 16% sugar.
And it basically winds its way through a series of channels
in the evaporator.
And as it moves through the evaporator
it condenses and gets more and more sugary.
More water's brought out in the form of steam
and it finally arrives here as syrup.
We mix in some diatomaceous earth to help filter the syrup.
So the diatomaceous earth
basically binds with the impurities
that are causing the syrup to look cloudy
and pressure pushes it through the filter press.
And there's a series of papers
where the diatomaceous earth
and the impurities are left behind,
leaving us with crystal clear product.
We put it in large stainless barrels.
It's a shelf stable product, at that point.
We're able to store it indefinitely
and throughout the year we bottle it into our glass bottles.
- [Announcer] So that is exactly
how you turn maple sap into maple syrup.
It works great on pancakes, in drinks, on dessert.
Once you try the real stuff and never go back.
(button clicking)
(upbeat music)