THE VIEW AT NIGHTFALL
Time for Maple Syrup BY LIZ BROWNLEE
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INDIANA HAS some excellent farms that produce maple syrup, but we are not one of them. Our maple syrup venture is purely for our own (and our family and friends’) enjoyment. We don’t sell it. Why? The first reason is clear: We only have a few sugar maple trees, so our production could never be large enough to make the endeavor profitable. The second reason is uncertainty. Indiana weather is fickle and increasingly more extreme: It might be 60 or 70 degrees on a winter day. To make maple syrup, we need cold nights (below freezing) and warm days (in the 40s, ideally).
After years of gaining experience on other farms, Nate Brownlee and his wife, Liz, moved back to Indiana to start their own family farm, which they named Nightfall Farm. Here, they share stories of the many trials, tribulations, successes and failures in running a family business. For more on Nightfall Farm, visit nightfallfarm.com.
That freeze-thaw cycle makes the trees’ sap run from the roots up to the branches, and some of it goes into our sap buckets. If the temperature fluctuates from hard freezes one week to days that feel like April the next, well, we simply won’t get any (or much) sap. We’re farmers, and farmers expect risk, including drastic weather. But given our small number of trees, we can’t build a business on something that risky. Instead, we make syrup just for ourselves, for fun. If it’s a terrible syrup year, we can buy syrup from an Indiana farm. If it’s a good year, we invite lots of friends over for pancakes. MAKING SYRUP Maple syrup surprises people. Maybe it’s because most folks our age (including Nate and I) were raised on Aunt Jemima or Mrs. Butterworth, with their corn-syrupy sweetness. It’s tasty stuff, but not exactly thought-provoking. Most people don’t seem to know that maple syrup comes from maple trees, or that they can make maple syrup, too. There are many different ways to make maple syrup, but the basics remain the same. First, you need a sugar maple tree and a little patience. These maples are called sugar maples because they have more sugar in their sap than other maples do. To make one gallon of maple syrup takes 40 gallons of sugar maple sap. You’ll need many more gallons if you tap
a red maple or any other tree. Next, you need some basic supplies to tap the tree and collect the sap that runs out of it. We work with very inexpensive (and some free) materials. We bought taps from a maple sugaring supply company. We already had the drill bit needed to make the hole in the tree. We asked around at restaurants and bakeries to get foodgrade buckets to collect the sap. Finally, you need fire. Maple syrup is basically just sap that’s been boiled long enough to get rid of most of the water. Getting rid of the water concentrates the sugar — because no one likes soggy pancakes. Maple syrup producers have heavy-duty, very expensive and very effective setups called “evaporators” that do the job well. At our scale, we opted to go the cheaper route. Nate researched and built two “rocket stoves” out of bricks. These stoves are often used in developing countries because they’re economical to build, and they use junk wood and twigs to create a focused, hot fire. We put old pressure cookers over the fire and boiled down our sap into syrup. We make fun days out of boiling our sap. The process requires constant tending (so that the sap doesn’t burn) and can take eight hours or more. We invite over a few friends, pull out lawn chairs, have a picnic while the sap boils, and enjoy the relaxed, no-pressure work before the farming season gets underway.
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FARM INDIANA // MARCH 2016
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