Westfield Heritage Village syrup maker Peter Lloyd holds a partially filled bucket of sap from one of 106 maple trees tapped on Feb. 23, the clear liquid indicating that it’s still good for making the sweet treat.
Richard Leitner Metroland
Westfield Heritage Village syrup maker Peter Lloyd uses a wood-fired stainless steel evaporator to turn filtered sap into syrup, boiling it at 104 degrees to get the right sugar content and viscosity.
Westfield Heritage Village syrup maker Peter Lloyd holds a partially filled bucket of sap from one of 106 maple trees tapped on Feb. 23, the clear liquid indicating that it’s still good for making the sweet treat.
Peter Lloyd dumps a pail of maple tree sap onto the forest floor, the tapped liquid’s fogginess indicating that it’s “going off” from springlike temperatures and unsuitable for the syrup that attracts thousands of people to Westfield Heritage Village every March.
The sap in other nearby pails is clear and usable, although a few dead, winged bugs floating on top are another sign — along with sprouting daffodils by a heritage building — of the warm winter upending the Rockton pioneer village’s normal maple syrup season.
Westfield Heritage Village syrup maker Peter Lloyd uses a wood-fired stainless steel evaporator to turn filtered sap into syrup, boiling it at 104 degrees to get the right sugar content and viscosity.
Richard Leitner Metroland
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“If this exceptional situation becomes the rule, then there’s kind of trouble,” says Lloyd, Westfield’s collections officer and, for the past three decades, maple syrup maker.
“The trees are going to become more like the trees in the United States, the Pennsylvania and Kentucky ones, that have smaller leaves, lower sugar and lower pressure than is good for making maple syrup,” he says, acknowledging that change could take decades.
Lloyd says the village usually taps trees for about five weeks beginning the last week of February and did so this year on Feb. 23. But he says warmer temperatures made that about three weeks too late and the sap from 106 sugar and black maple trees was already waning by mid-March.
“We have got reasonable volumes for the amount of time that they’ve been tapped,” he says, adding that it takes 40 litres of sap to make one litre of syrup, the average yield expected from each tree this year.
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Nelson McLachlan, president of the Southwestern Ontario Maple Syrup Producers Association, says he’s not too concerned about the warmer winter, although it adjusted the tapping season, which usually starts around Feb. 20.
His Parkhill farm tapped trees on Jan. 25 based on weather forecasts — probably a few days late — and finished on March 4, but the quality and volumes were within the average for the past five years, he says.
“You can’t do everything by the calendar. It just changes the schedule of when we tap and collect,” McLachlan says. “I’m not one of these climate guys that are all concerned about the world coming to an end.”
Whether or not 2024’s warm winter is an outlier or a signal of climate change, Lloyd says the science of making maple syrup is clear, relying on freeze-and-thaw weather.
As spring approaches, trees draw water and nutrients from the ground to reinflate their bodies, depositing their stored sugar from the previous year into the liquid, which feeds their growth and leaf buds.
But the flow and sweetness of sap weakens once nighttime temperatures climb above freezing and other nutrients affect purity.
“If you’re flipping back and forth over the freezing point, that’s perfect,” Lloyd says. “When the tree freezes at night, the pressure drops and it lets it pull in more water, and the next day when the sun shines on it and it thaws and warms up again, the pressure goes high and sap comes out of the (tap) hole.”
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Warmer weather brings another challenge, he notes during a visit to the sugar shack where he demonstrates syrup making, requiring barrels of sap to be kept cool with submersed buckets of ice to avoid it turning slimy.
“You take a scoop of it and you lift it, it just trails like pizza cheese. It’s awful and the smell hits you and it’s something you’ve never smelt before and never want to smell again.”
Unlike pioneers, Lloyd uses a wood-fired stainless steel evaporator to turn filtered sap into syrup, boiling it at 104 degrees to get a sugar content of 66 per cent, which gets the right viscosity and keeps it from spoiling.
The syrup is finely filtered to remove “organic gunk” and minerals that will crystalize it in a jar, which also occurs if sugar content is too high.
Free samples are doled out to visitors in shot-sized paper cups and a highlight of his demonstration of the technique, the taste nothing like the syrup pioneers using brass pots would have made, he says.
“They would almost build a kiln of stone and put their pot down in it so they’d get at least some decent heat exchange,” Lloyd says. “It probably turned out pretty dark and spooky, and it was a lot more work.”
Westfield’s syrup-making demonstrations continue on March 17, 24, 29 and 31. Reservations for two-hour time slots between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. are required. For more details, see westfieldheritage.ca or call 1-855-227-5267.
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