Summary of Research Presentations from 2016 NAMSC Annual Meeting
Summaries of research presentations from 2016 NAMSC annual meeting.
Topic: Syrup Production
Showing 121 – 130 of 210 resources
Fundamentals of Filtering Maple Syrup
Best practices for filtering pure maple syrup.
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What causes syrup to be light or dark at different parts of the season?
The Cost of Production for Vermont Maple Syrup
The University of Vermont Maple Benchmark project is advancing the study of maple economics and supporting management decision making at the individual business level. The following article summarizes the cost of production findings from 2014 and synthesizes key trends in business management.
Planning for the Future of your Sugaring Operation
With an aging farmer population, including maple producers, more attention must be paid to how farmers can successfully transition out of active farming. At the same time, burgeoning interest in farming from young (and not so young) folks – many of whom do not come from farm backgrounds – offers creative transition opportunities. Older farmers can arrange for the continuing productive use of sugarbush and other productive lands.
Maple Syrup Production Statistics
A compilation of all publicly-available data on syrup production.
Ask Proctor
Q1: I’m considering switching from a flat pan to a larger pan with continuous flow, and keep hearing about the gradient. What is a gradient and why is it important? Q2: After a warm spell that made the sap stop running, a hard freeze made it start again so I collected and boiled. The syrup had an off-flavor. Why?
North American Maple Contest Guidelines
This document provides judging outlines for Maple Syrup, Maple Sugar (hard and soft), Stirred Maple Sugar, Maple Butter/Maple Cream, Maple Jelly and Innovative/New Maple Products. Sample score sheets are provided for both individual and combined contest entries.
Things You Can Do to Ensure the Quality of Your Maple Syrup
After producing maple syrup for over 40 years and teaching seminars on maple syrup production for close to 20, I have made or personally witnessed most of the common mistakes that lead to off flavors and poor syrup quality. In this article I will go over some, but certainly not all, of the factors that lead to poor syrup quality. The good news is that most of the factors can be controlled by producers with best practices, in turn meaning you control the quality of your syrup. The Map of Maple Off Flavors (linked above) identifies 5 primary areas where off flavors occur: Mother Nature, defoamer, processing, chemicals and others. I want to address each area in order of how they would occur from start of season to finish.
Maple Syrup and the New U.S. Food Safety Rules
The final rules for the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) have been issued, after several years of drafts and revisions, and concern about what the new regulations would mean for maple producers. Based on a read of the rules, and a discussion with Jenny Scott, Senior Advisor at the Office of Food Safety of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, for most sugarmakers the impact will be minimal.