Sugaring-off season

In my family, sugaring-off season was spent visiting my grandparents, my parents, and my uncles. Every Sunday, we’d visit the sugar shacks. We’d meet up with cousins, aunts and uncles to eat taffy on snow. It was a very family-oriented activity. It’s perhaps part of our fondest memories of running through the forest and playing in the snow, while dipping our wooden sticks or “palettes” into hot syrup and then eating the taffy on snow. So, it’s one of our happiest childhood memories.

The way we harvest our maple sap, all of our taps are actually on tubing. We call it 5/16 tubing. In the end, that’s very small blue tubing. It’s connected to a main line, which is actually a larger Carlon pipe. These pipes then lead to our pumping station, which is located much further down, 800 metres from the cabin. That’s where it enters the large stainless steel tanks before being brought back to the cabin for evaporation.

Here, our entire production at the moment, what we boil down, is maple sap from the equivalent of 4,100 taps. Our entire production is made into by-products. We make all of the classics, including maple butter, granulated sugar, and taffy. We make sugar nuggets too, so really the classics, soft sugar, you know, the things that we see, plus hard sugar cubes, the things we see regularly. But we’ve also added pastries such as pies and doughnuts. We’ve added spreads made of caramel, maple nut butters, pear butters. So, with time, we’ve really added different product lines, even made of chocolate, as well as the candies we make with chocolate. We fill the chocolates with maple butter sauce. So we also try to adapt a bit to the demands of our customers, our consumers who live nearby.