Sweetening the Pan | Making Maple Syrup in North Carolina
In this short film, we bring you into Waterfall Farm, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. We walk to work through the snow and up the mountain.
At the sugar house we open up our systems, let down the season’s first run of sap, and light a fire for our first boil. There’s no talking- just the ambient sounds of the season and the tasks at hand.
We call the first boil of the season “sweetening the pan.” This is because we are filling the pan with sap for the first time that season. The sap in the pan is mostly water, still too dilute that first day to make finished syrup. It’s perhaps the most quiet day of the season in the sugar house as we open up our systems, and reacquaint ourselves with the many tasks of the sugar house. Once the pan is “sweet” the real work begins.
We are a small family farm and North Carolina’s only maple syrup producer. Each winter we set about 800 taps in red and sugar maples across 25 acres of native, mixed hardwood forest. Our southern sugar season runs from late January into early March. Maple sap is sweetest at winter’s end as the trees prepare to bloom. Fresh sap is nearly clear, flows like water, and is only faintly sweet. In the sugar house, we boil this tree water down, which concentrates and caramelizes it into syrup.
Join our farm-specific newsletter at WaterfallFarmNC.com to hear more farm stories and be in the loop when this year’s syrup becomes available.