Maple syrup season in New Brunswick is sweet as ever

Like the syrup itself, amateur and commercial maple syrup producers are gushing this year.

Stephen Heard is a Fredericton-based professor of biology and a maple syrup lover. He had a slow start to the year but said that things have really turned around.

"I thought it was going to be a complete write off. The first few weeks I tapped were terrible," Heard said. "Either it didn't cool down enough at night or it didn't warm up enough during the day. And I just got dribbles and dribbles of sap."

Then, things changed.

"The floodgates opened and it's been pretty good since," Heard said. "I've had several days when from my eight taps I bring in 30-35 litres of sap in a day."

That amount of sap boils down to produce about 19 litres of maple syrup. He said that in his worst year he produced only eight or nine litres of syrup and in his best year — 2018 — he produced 29. 

"We made 29 litres of syrup from our four trees, which was amazing. It just wouldn't ever stop, it just kept gushing out."

He said that the biggest difference between a good and bad year is the weather.

In 2018, "we had just week after week of perfect sap weather," which he said is -4 C or -5 C at night and 5 C or 6 C during the day. "And it just repeats. And it was amazing."

This year, he said, the weather wasn't right at first but then shifted and was pretty close to perfect, but it's a short season.

Before too long, "the holes that I drilled will stop yielding because the tree will start to heal and when the buds start to burst, then the syrup has an off flavour. You don't want that. So there is an end date, but we're not there yet."

He has five maple trees in his backyard, four of which he taps yearly. For him, the process is simple.

"Every afternoon, I go out with a bucket full of empty pop bottles and fill them with the sap," Heard said. "And then I boil, boil, boil, boil, boil."

The New Brunswick Maple Syrup Association, which describes itself as the voice of the province's maple syrup industry, started in 2003 with 15 members but now represents more than 150 across the province. 

Frédérick Alain Dion, the association's general director, said the start dates vary, depending on where in the province you are — earlier in the south and later in the north. 

He said this year the season started at the end of February and early March. And there was a "crazy week" about three weeks ago where temperatures were perfect and trees were giving sap for 80 to 90 hours nonstop, Dion said.

Maple syrup season will be coming to an end in the south in the next two weeks, based on word from southern producers. 

Heard grew up watching his father help a friend who ran a large sugar bush and remembers the old-fashioned evaporators "with billows of steam" and people throwing "lengths of wood into the boiler underneath."

He said he can't quite produce that experience with his backyard operation but it's still worth the effort. 

There's just something "magic about making syrup in your own backyard," he said. He called the process amazing and described the smell that fills the house while the sap boils as "marvellous." 

For his family, backyard tapping is a spring family tradition that he, his wife and his son all look forward to. 

He gives some of his syrup to friends and to a neighbour who shares one of the trees but, also, "I do have a son who eats a lot of pancakes."