Students from the Bradford Area Christian Academy learned how to make maple syrup at Sprague’s Maple Farms in Portville, N.Y., where they were given a walking tour from Randy Sprague showing the history and processes of making maple syrup followed by breakfast.

One stop along the way was the sugar shack, where the maple sap is boiled down in an evaporator to make maple syrup. To make top quality maple products the sap must be fresh and cold, which means it must be gathered and boiled often.

In Sprague’s orchards small plastic tubing is attached directly to the spouts. The sap then flows through the small plastic tubes to larger pipes, and directly to the storage tank, thus saving the labor of gathering the sap.

From the storage tank the sap flows, to the evaporator. Evaporators are large pans, varying in size according to the size of the operation. A popular size is 5 feet wide and 16 feet long. Most evaporators have two pans: the flue pan and the syrup pan. The sap flows first to the flue pan, which has a bottom made of flues to provide a greater heating surface, and then to the flat bottomed syrup pan. The pans are divided by partitions, which creates a continual but very slow movement of sap from the point where it enters the evaporator around the many partitions and finally out of the evaporator as syrup.

After touring the maple forest and tapping set up, the huge collection tanks and seeing the sugar shack and evaporator, the students were treated to breakfast by the Spragues consisting of bacon, hot chocolate, pancakes, and, of course, fresh maple syrup.

Sprague’s Maple Farms not only sells maple syrup in the United States but also ships maple syrup to Europe.