READFIELD, Maine — This weekend, Maple producers all throughout Maine will open their doors for Maine Maple Sunday Weekend. For the past 40 years, this tradition has allowed people to try a wide variety of maple products and support maple producers across the state.
Nowadays, the event has expanded to both Saturday and Sunday, but some sugarhouses are still only open on Sunday. For example, Dead Stream Farm Maple in Readfield is only open on Sunday. Its owner, Dave Harriman, said there's a lot of work that goes into just one bottle of syrup.
Harriman says dozens of his maple trees fell down during December's storm and, after a lot of cleaning, he has been producing fresh maple syrup nonstop to serve to all the people who stop by his sugarhouse in Kennebec County.
"So we can try and maintain the numbers after the wind storm in December," he explained. "[We] lost two or three dozen trees, so our numbers are a little down this year due to storm damage."
Harriman said the process starts with maple trunks filled with watery sap. Those trunks get tapped, and then they wait for Mother Nature to deliver.
As a construction worker, Harriman started doing maple syrup years ago just as a hobby. Now, that effort has turned into a full-time job.
"I started with 25 buckets, right here, collected by hand, cooked on a wood stove and now we are 18,000 taps," he said.
Harriman said the process from start to finish to make a single maple syrup bottle is labor-intensive.
"Fix the lines. Put your pumps out. Boil. Filter. Bottle. Clean. There's a lot of cleaning," he explained.
"This is about every 7 minutes," Harriman said as he added wood to keep cooking the sap.
He said the goal of this process is to evaporate the water and isolate the sugar.
"You can filter a lot of water out, but that doesn't make it syrup," he explained.
Once cooked, it gets to the right temperature, and the maple syrup starts dripping. From there it goes into a filter. Then the bottling happens.
Harriman will have dozens of maple products and maple syrup bottles for sale this Sunday at his farm, located at 67 Winthrop Road in Readfield.
"We will be doing pancakes, ice cream, fudge, all maple stuff. Everybody can sample a lot of maple," he said excitedly.
Click here for a full list of participating Maine Maple Sunday Weekend Sunday sugarhouses.