On to Vermont

On Friday, we left Dennie and Jim's "camp" and continued on toward Vermont...

"Welcome to Vermont"

We soon arrived at our Harvest Host location for the evening, Happy Hill Maple Farm, where Karl taught us about the process of making maple syrup.

They started the maple syrup collection and bottling just a few years ago. Karl's son "taps" about 21,000 trees each winter. They have tubing through the woods that the taps feed into, and which eventually comes into their farm building...

... to a vacuum pump that pulls the sap into the pump house...

... where it goes into these big vats. When the sap comes in, it is only 2% sugar.

It is fed through a reverse osmosis system that removes 75% of the water from the sap, collecting the water (distilled water) that is then used to clean all the items in the process that need to be cleaned, while passing the resultant liquid (now about 25% sugar) along to the next process.

Part of the reverse osmosis system.

Holding tanks (above) for post-reverse osmosis liquid.

The liquid then goes into the oil-fueled Leader Evaporator - the resultant syrup is 66% sugar.

It takes 45 gallons of raw sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup.

Additional barrels for holding syrup - the wooden barrels are from either rum or bourbon distilleries that allow them to make specialized syrup products.

Packaged product

Gift shop...

More items in the gift shop

Information from their website: https://www.happyhillmaplefarms.com/about-us and https://www.happyhillmaplefarms.com/making-syrup

We always enjoy learning things as we travel!