BIG maple producers

[BryanEx]

This info from a New Brunswick maple producer certainly caught my attention today!

Our sugary consists of approximately 90, 000 taps nestled in a natural and pristine forest, producing approximately 22,000 gallons of organic maple syrup annually.
Just how big can a single maple operation get???

[markct]

yea thats definatly big but not all that unheard of i dont think, last i knew bascoms was boiling from about 70,000 taps! thats alot of taps no matter how ya do it, i remember bruce telling me how when he was a kid they had 6000 buckets on the farm, that had to take a big crew to empty im sure!

[ToadHill]

I've heard that there are a lot of really large producers up on the Golden Road in Maine. I've also had snowmobilers come back from Canada and tell me about all of the large operations they have ridden through up there.

[802maple]

There are many producers in Canada over 100,000 and some over 150,000

[collinsmapleman2012]

should be taking a school trip to canada this spring, and on the agenda is to visit a producer that stores sap in swimming pools. one phrase comes to mind:

Kid in a Candy Store!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[shane hickey]

I have always wanted to visit one of these producer, I have hurd about them and read about them but just put it in to perpective of what I have, I hear some of them have their own bottling plant.

[BryanEx]

There are many producers in Canada over 100,000 and some over 150,000
I have over 200 Quebec sugarbush links to work my way through tomorrow. I'll be watching for 100,000+ producers to see if they have a gallery page on their site.


should be taking a school trip to canada this spring, and on the agenda is to visit a producer that stores sap in swimming pools.
Any idea what the producer name is?

[shane hickey]

Please! Bryan that would be great .

[collinsmapleman2012]

i dont but if i find out ill tell you

[boondocker]

I live in north eastern maine, there is a producer in the jackman area that we came across a few winters ago while we where off trail riding on sleds. this guy built a 4500 square foot sugar house. half is living quaters and the other is all buisness. he had six 3000 gal. vert tanks for storage. not sure what he had for a boiler but it looked like a locamotive. the main feed line coming into the house was 6". he said he was well into the 100,000 club. year round buisness for him. originally from vermont. would love to tell you where i was was, but when we are ridding 80% of the time we are lost. lol but as you guys where saying. there are som big producers out there.

[markcasper]

Only 18000 gallons of sap storage for 100,000 taps seems to be cutting it a little close. I would hate to be on the other end when something malfunctioned and the sap was pouring in.

Don't they say that when the sap really goes it can be as high as 1/2 gallon per tap per hour? YIKES!!!!

[mapleack]

I live in north eastern maine, there is a producer in the jackman area that we came across a few winters ago while we where off trail riding on sleds. this guy built a 4500 square foot sugar house. half is living quaters and the other is all buisness. he had six 3000 gal. vert tanks for storage. not sure what he had for a boiler but it looked like a locamotive. the main feed line coming into the house was 6". he said he was well into the 100,000 club. year round buisness for him. originally from vermont. would love to tell you where i was was, but when we are ridding 80% of the time we are lost. lol but as you guys where saying. there are som big producers out there.

Possibly Scott Wheeler?

[Revi]

I went up to visit one of the really big operations on the Golden Road. They tapped 65,000 at the time. They had two enormous evaporators in a huge sugarhouse. As you drove up you saw pump stations where the 4" lines came in. They had made so much that they had barrels lining the road near the sugarhouse waiting to be picked up.

A friend visited another 100,000 tap operation that took up 3000 vertical feet of mountainside on the border between Maine and Quebec. All the taps came down to a sugarhouse with a huge RO and a large evaporator. He said that the final product was streaming out of the evap like a firehose. It was a nice day so the trees were pumping out barrels and barrels of medium syrup continuosly.

I think these guys are tapping 43,000 now. They had some trees cut for veneer when Enron owned the land. They are organic now and they market their own product.

https://www.mainemapleproductsinc.com/productcart/pc/about.asp

[nas]

Try this one http://www.domorewithmaple.com/aboutlapierre.html 150,000 taps. It has pics of their evaporator room too.:o

Nick

[boondocker]

Try this one http://www.domorewithmaple.com/aboutlapierre.html 150,000 taps. It has pics of their evaporator room too.:o

Nick

nice set up, but that place looks more like a factory than a sugar house. still its pretty awesome to see a set up that big

[gmcooper]

A couple friends of mine hunt up near the golden road and they pass a maple operation that has multiple 3" lines that run for 2+ miles to the sugar house. They checked with odometer. They told me roughly where the place was but I don't remember the details. They talked with a guy working there once and he told then he did not know the actual tap count. I'm sure owners knew approximate number but may not have wanted anyone else to know.

[ennismaple]

150,000 taps @ 1200 taps per day per 2-man crew - I'd better get started tapping now! Crazy!!!

[chipa]

I went on the "tour after the tour" after the international meeting in North Conway years ago.We spent a week in Somerset County Maine touring the big operations up there.We stayed at the Pittston Farm and toured from there. Great hospitality from all the producers.These are all true camps; big diesel generators for power,full living quarters.
That trip was a blast!

[mapleack]

I went on the "tour after the tour" after the international meeting in North Conway years ago.We spent a week in Somerset County Maine touring the big operations up there.We stayed at the Pittston Farm and toured from there. Great hospitality from all the producers.These are all true camps; big diesel generators for power,full living quarters.
That trip was a blast!

I'm jealous! I really wanted to go on that, didn't have the time.

[maplwrks]

[QUOTE=markcasper;123600]Only 18000 gallons of sap storage for 100,000 taps seems to be cutting it a little close. I would hate to be on the other end when something malfunctioned and the sap was pouring in.

I doesn't take long to process sap at 4800 gallons an hour!

[maple flats]

Well, you think those operations are big, I've got 600 taps, climbing to 900-1000 for 2011!!! Ha!

[Homestead Maple]

should be taking a school trip to canada this spring, and on the agenda is to visit a producer that stores sap in swimming pools. one phrase comes to mind:

Kid in a Candy Store!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Another phrase comes to mind: There's no p in our ool!

[Randy Brutkoski]

That wouldnt of been Scott Wheelers 100,000 taps because he only has about 30,000 or so.

[BryanEx]

I have over 200 Quebec sugarbush links to work my way through tomorrow. I'll be watching for 100,000+ producers to see if they have a gallery page on their site.

Well, my efforts yesterday were a bit of a bust in the sense of this discussion. When I first asked my question I strictly had in mind # of taps = size of producer but the Quebec maple industry is very different than all the other Provinces and States I've seen. Go to any producer web site listed on Sugarbush.Info and you will see a common theme;

We started with X number of taps and now have X+
You can buy our syrup here, here, and here.
We make the best maple syrup.

With the Quebec producers there was rarely any mention of how many taps or where to buy, it was ALL about the food, festivities, and heritage. Instead of telling how much syrup they make, they market how many people they can sit for meals with 500+ at one sitting not uncommon. One operation could sit 2500 people for weekend brunch! That's BIG too - only in a different way. Here's a smaller but typical example - www.erabliere-cheminduroy.qc.ca (http://www.erabliere-cheminduroy.qc.ca)

The big factory style sugarbush operations don't seem to market to consumers and so far I've only found 1 link (with no mention of taps or production photos) other than the lapierre link posted earlier in this thread.

[220 maple]

Sometime in the past 5 years a fellow syrupmaker friend upgraded his equipment, he went directly to Leader to make his purchase. Because we finish long before the season is complete in northern US and Canada he was offered by someone at Leader to go into Canada and visit some maple camps. This was before you needed a Passport. The first camp was a small by their standards ca. 35000 taps. Family run operation. Right when they arrived a tractor trailer tank truck pull up to the camp it had a load of sap that the driver had picked up in the sugar bush. The neat part of the story was the driver. She was a very young girl. My friend asked her how old she was and she replied 14. He said she looked that age but he was amazed that she was driving a semi load of sap from a back road in the sugarbush. They go inside and meet the owner and tour the camp. A little later the young lady comes into the camp and tells the owner (her dad) that there is another half a load left out in the bush and she was going back to get it. After she leaves my friend tells the owner / dad that she told him she was 14 years old. He smiles and said she lying she only 13 her birthday is next week. My friend is amazed and said to the dad that is asking alot of a young person male or female. And the father said she has two choices keep it on the road or slide in the ditch. If she slides in the ditch we go get her out.
Then they went to another camp. When they walked into the evaporation room there was nine large evaporator running wide open with two men stationed at each machine, and a hoist truck running around picking up barrels of syrup that was coming off. He asked the tour guide where do you get enough water to keep nine machine running like that. He had already seen the RO room. The guide took him outside and behind the camp was a Olimpic size pool that had 12 six inch lines dumping sap into the pool. He asked the guide how many taps was feeding those line and the guide said over 100000 taps. This info is second hand however I consider my source to be a person who does not stretch the truth.

Mark 220 Maple

[twobears1224]

are swimming pool liners food grade??? :D

delbert

[chipa]

I saw a lined tank that was 30,000 gallons or so at Darveau's sugarbush in Ham Nord.The liner was supposedly food grade.

[802maple]

I doesn't take long to process sap at 4800 gallons an hour!



Yes Mike but that is with only one RO when you mention 4800 gallons per hour, they also have 2 more at Lapierre maple farms which allows them at full bore to process 14,400 gallons per hour. I have been there when everything is going full bore and the guy barreling syrup doesn't have time to hick up even. It kind of reminded me of Lucille Ball on the candy assembly line.

[BryanEx]

L.B. Maple Treat (http://www.lbmapletreat.com) - 100,000+ taps
Canadian Organic Maple (http://canadianorganicmaple.com) - 90,000 taps
(look for the links at the bottom of the page for that second one)

[PARKER MAPLE]

that wouldnt of been scott wheelers 100,000 taps because he only has about 30,000 or so.

only!!!! Ha ha ha

[nhmaple48]

Has anyone heard about the new operation being set up in Dover Plains,N.Y.? Supposed to have 50-60.000 this year and expand to 250,000 in the future.

[Amber Gold]

What kind of production numbers are these producers striving for? quart per tap or 1/2 gal per tap? I'm figuring if you're trying to maintain high vac. on orchards this large, it'd take a small army to walk the woods.

[Dennis H.]

Just think of the size of vac pump and releasers that they will use!!
How about the size of mainline where it meets up with the releaser!
It has to be the size of a culvert pipe!

[MapleI]

Hi All!
In those big operations, when do they start tapping? We always debate: should we tap ahead of the first flow to get right on it, or during the first flow, or wait til it really starts in ernest, with the idea that tapping too early can lead to early tap drying...

Any thoughts???


800+- taps, 550 on vac starting '11, 2 x 6 Leader with steamaway, 52 gph (yes, I know...). We're putting on another 2 x 4' flue pan to capture some of the waste heat going up the chimney and hope for 70 gph...

[DrTimPerkins]

In those big operations, when do they start tapping? We always debate: should we tap ahead of the first flow to get right on it, or during the first flow, or wait til it really starts in ernest, with the idea that tapping too early can lead to early tap drying...

The big operations (tens of thousands) up this way (northern VT) usually start tapping shortly after the New Year. The objective is to finish before the "normal" weather for good sap runs occurs. If they get a decent thaw for a period, they'll stop tapping and make syrup until it freezes up again.

Research done at UVM PMRC by Tim Wilmot (UVM Maple Extension Specialist)has shown that, in general, tapping early poses less of a risk to sap production than waiting until after a good run or two....at least for gravity or vacuum tubing operations. If you miss a sap run, it is surely lost yield. There is some slight risk of sap flow reductions (taphole drying....actually not drying, but a reduction in sap flow due to microbial action and tree response to microbes) in trees tapped early, but generally you don't lose enough to offset the loss you'd have from tapping too late.

The paper, which was published in the "Maple Digest" is located at: http://www.uvm.edu/~pmrc/tapping.pdf The research was funded, in part, by the North American Maple Syrup Council Research Fund....derived from that "penny per container" that many people voluntarily pay.