21st Annual Maple Syrup Festival at Sugarbush

This weekend is the 21st Annual Maple Syrup Festival at Leanne and Michael’s Sugarbush Farm in Salem, IN. This year’s festival runs February 25-26 & March 3-4 from 9:00am – 5:00pm. Grasshoppers will have a tent this year on the first Saturday of the event, so come out and say hello!

Micheal sent over a letter about the farm for you to enjoy.

Nestled in the scenic Southern Indiana hills is our farm, Leane and Michael’s Sugarbush, Indiana’s largest producer of pure maple syrup. During the early winter months you can find us busy preparing for the maple syrup season and our annual festival. We have produced over 13,000 gallons of pure maple syrup over the last 27 years.  The first few years saw us boiling the sap in an open pan under a winter sky and bottling the resulting dark syrup in quart canning jars.  In 1982 we bought our first evaporator made especially for making maple syrup and began modernizing our operation.  Since changing over to a larger evaporator in 1988, we added and now use the most modern equipment available in the maple industry – plastic tubing, vacuum pumps, and a reverse osmosis machine.

The fundamental process of making pure maple syrup has not changed since the Native American Indians made it and later taught the process to the early pioneers hundreds of years ago.  Drawn from the maple trees in late winter, maple sap contains an average of 2 % sugar and drips like water from the tapholes drilled into the trees.  It takes an average of 50 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup.  The basic process requires an average of 49 gallons of water to be evaporated from each 50 gallons of sap collected in order to turn it into syrup.  Although our technology gives us far different equipment with which to do this, the process is still the same as that used in the earliest days of North America’s history.

Our sap is collected through plastic tubing, gently drawn into large tanks with vacuum pumps and then put through a reverse osmosis machine that removes 50% of the water, leaving a more concentrated sap.  It is then boiled in the evaporator until it is 67% sugar, drawn off into buckets, and poured into drums where it is stored until being bottled and heading off to grace someone’s breakfast table with its rich, wholesome goodness.

Even with this modern equipment, one thing has not changed since the Native American syrup making days – it is still labor intensive, requiring many hours of hard work.  When syrup season rolls around each year we don’t have to look for help; many area teens and adults call us to see if it is time to come to work!!  The hard work fosters a spirit of community, while everyone contributes to and benefits from the sweet success of the season.  Our three children, formerly homeschooled, are now 26, 22 and 18 and are an integral part of the syrup making and festival work.”