Besides planting some trees, build a front end UI for your sugar maple farm db that helps you track where the current trees are and how much sap they're producing. Then set up a barter with a brewer down south to trade beer for maple products. I'm sure some of that beer would contain maple products if you can convince them to come up with a good recipe...
The way it was told to me by two different people that make syrup was that the Grade D was what you got when the bottom of the evaporator become covered in cooked/caramelized/burnt syrup. One place (April's Maple) when she was just starting said that out of the 55 barrels they produced they only got 3 barrels of Grade D. They kept one barrel for themselves and sold the other two to farmers as pig feed because Grade D just wouldn't sell in the stores, but they knew how good it was hence the barrel they kept for themselves. And when they let us try some, I quickly found out why - because that stuff is freaking awesome. Since then, it's been regraded as Grade A - Very Dark and you see it on the shelves in some stores.
This is the wife's cousin's sugar shack we visited - and we get free syrup from him...
Interesting, and that makes sense. And it's not surprising why once I found and tried that stuff not for human consumption that's what I always preferred. And now that the grading criteria changed, it's still preferred but you can't get it down here. So I get the darkest that I can find, when I can find the real stuff. I think the folks down here just accept fake syrup 'cause that's all they have ever had and don't realize why the real stuff is as expensive as it is.
I'll bet that sugar house smelled amazing, even though they weren't making any. Kind of like that time I visited a real balsamic vinegar acetaia that smelled heavenly...
You'd be surprised at how much there is no smell at all. Everything is vented and maple sap doesn't have much of an aroma. With sugar maples you're looking at about 20 gallons of sap for 1 gallon of syrup. It's mostly just water sitting in the shack. One thing the wife's cousin does is run the sap through a reverse osmosis system to get rid of about 80% of the water. He's able to produce more since his boiling times are greatly diminished since there's only about 3 weeks where they're getting enough sap from the trees. This is one of the tanks being filled from his lines...
It does surprise me that there isn't that much of a smell. I figured that once you're starting to boil off the water, the concentrated sap would at least have a woody sweetness that stays behind. Maybe the sugar shack is still too new and the smell hasn't permeated the surrounding structure yet. That balsamic acetaia that I visited had been there for a few hundred years. They have been making the stuff for generations so just walking in you get this amazing sweet sour aroma that just knocks you off your feet.
Maybe it's sugars that don't leave a persistent aroma unlike a lot of different oils. I had no idea that one of the esters produced would give a bubblegum flavor. Sounds good on paper, probably real bad in practice...
Bubblegum in beer is surprisingly a good thing. When the banana and clove esters are well balanced, it comes out tasting more like bubblegum and nothing at all like that Hubba Bubba soda that you wanted to chew each time you took a sip.
One beer that you can get up there is Hoegaarden, it's a great summer beer and really refreshing. It's one of the originals that inspired Coors to brew Blue Moon.
I'll have to give that a try. It's the season for it. I'll just have to see if there's any nearby farms that have their harvest for sale...
Oh, and if you can find Celis White, Allagash White, or Unibroue Blanche de Chambly, those are all worthy alternatives...
I dunno man. $12 for a 6-pack and they're only 11.2oz bottles. Drinking might be pricing itself out of my league...
Yeah, there is that too. Check other stores, I've seen a six go that high as well, where other places have them around $8 for the six. It's getting to the point where homebrewing may just be a real financially sound decision...
You keep pushing the pine - it aint gonna happen. However, nothing will ever come close the amazing scent of freshly cut pine. I would honestly put fried bacon 2nd on the list...
Ok, then there at least we agree. Fresh cut pine is a pretty amazing scent. Fresh cut pine lumber is as well...
I wish there was a hard wood that had the same kind of scent when cut. Pine/fir/spruce are just so soft that I don't want to work with them. But when doing a simple jig and I get the chance to cut some fir boards, I tend to linger a little longer in my shop afterwards...
wood... hehehahah hahah hah he eh hehehe