Maple Sugaring Marks the First Harvest of the Season for North Country Producers
By Tim Rowland | Contributing Writer
In northeastern agriculture, maple is the first harvest of the year. And even if some mushy snow is still hanging onto the hillsides, maple syrup revelers know in their sweet, sticky souls that if the sap’s on its way in, winter is on its way out.
This time of year can be celebrated during New York’s Maple Weekends, which are scheduled for March 21–22 and March 28–29, 2026. During these weekends, hundreds of maple producers across the state open their sugarhouses from 10 am to 4 pm for public tours, demonstrations, and pancake breakfasts.
For those who do not hail from these parts, they may be introduced to maple goodness for the first time. “I get so many people who have never tried maple syrup before in their life,” said Joy Herfurth, owner of Olde Tyme Winery at Brandy Brook Maple Farm in Ellenburg Center. “All they’ve had is corn syrup or something, and it’s amazing to see their faces when they try the pure product, because this is so good.”
But syrup as a pancake appliqué is not the only way it can be enjoyed, nor are maples the only trees that can be tapped.
“The forest has all these resources for us; we just have to take advantage of it,” Herfurth said. “We are innovative in that we’re making our wine using maple syrup as a fermenting sugar. So not only are we growing the fruit and the grapes, but we’re producing our own sugar, fermenting with it, start to finish. So basically, everything is made right here on site.”
Producers are also tapping other trees besides maple, including birch, aspen, beech and walnut. This adds interest and new flavors for the consumer, and helps producers diversify, said Adam Wild, director of Cornell University’s Uihlein Maple Research Forest in Lake Placid.
Maple became the gold standard not just for its high sugar content, but it’s also its strong flow of sap. Sap will flow out of a maple, but has to be suctioned out of a birch, Wild said. And it takes about three times the sap to make a gallon of birch syrup as it does maple.
“The traditional method of drilling a hole and putting a bucket on those trees doesn’t give you any sap,” Wild said. “You actually have to put a vacuum on and suck the sap from those trees.”
Despite it being harder to get the sap and needing more of it, advances in sap reduction using reverse osmosis have made the process efficient enough to be productive.
From a forestry aspect, a diverse sugarbush with multiple species is better than a monoculture represented only by maple. Birch sap doesn’t start running until the tail end of the maple season, extending this early spring harvest season for producers.
“Why bother tapping these trees? One thing is that the flavors are different and unique,” Wild said. “Birch flavor can vary quite a bit. Early in the season you can get birch syrup that is fairly close to maple syrup, and is pretty sweet and not too far off from maple syrup — but most birch syrup tends to be what I like to compare as a balsamic vinegar reduction.”
Which can be an unwelcome surprise for someone putting it on their waffles.
“If you think about balsamic vinegar, you probably don’t want to put it in your yogurt or on your pancakes like you would with maple syrup,” Wild said. “But it’s great pairing it with salmon or roasted vegetables, or drizzling over fresh tomato, fresh mozzarella, goat cheese, or one of my favorites, using it with a white pizza.”
To help people understand the difference, Uihlein’s sugarbush bottles birch syrup in tall, slim bottles that resemble vinegar and olive oil vessels rather than the typical maple casks and jugs.
For producers, it can be interesting to experiment with other trees because of the variety. “Each is different,” Wild said. “Aspen and beech, I find, are kind of between the birch and the maple in that the beech flavors are closer to maple than the birch, so they’re not as strong. They’re more on the sweeter side, and have notes like raisin, dried pear or plums.”
Birch sap has also found its way into beverages, marketed as a health drink, and spirits.
“People are willing to give it a try, and it’s actually been selling fairly well,” WIld said. “We certainly don’t sell as much as we do maple syrup, or produce as much, but the last couple of years, we’ve actually been selling out of what we’ve made.”
Chef Robert Dumas, Director of the Institute of Adventure Hospitality and Food at Paul Smith’s College, said he appreciates maple as an ingredient, but also as an anchor to the North Country that is thousands of years old, according to American Indian Magazine.
“I think that the tradition of tapping and reducing sap to make a sweetener predates any kind of cooking that we would recognize as modern, which is largely a European influence,” he said. “As an Adirondack chef, or as a modern Adirondack chef, I think that maple syrup is a wonderful opportunity to give your food a sense of terroir — a French cooking term that refers to a sense of place.”
And unlike other sugars, the sweetener derived from trees does not disturb the soil or ecosystem, nor does it require fertilizers or pesticides. It’s minimally invasive to the land that the grove stands on.
Using maple in cooking is very approachable, from a quick sauce for a chicken breast – to salad dressing – to a glaze for grilling or chicken wings. “Alternatively, you could do a soft cheese, like brie or camembert, drizzle maple syrup over that and have that sweet and salty kind of combination, along with some crackers or bread,” Dumas said. “It’s a really lovely way to highlight maple syrup in a way that’s kind of unique.”
Maple, of course, has also found its way into creams and candies, seltzers, bacon and hot dogs and even peanut butter — giving producers plenty of ideas for product diversity.
While maples and a handful of other trees can be tapped, that’s not true of all tree species. Maples, birch and the like are “diffuse porous,” with uniform pores throughout the growth period that facilitate tapping, said Michael “Maple Mike” Rechlin, a lecturer at Paul Smith’s and expert on tree physiology. “Ring-porous” trees like oak ash and hickory, on the other hand, have pores that decrease in size during the growing season, cutting off the flow of sap.
This tidbit of tree physiology can lead to some curious discoveries.
“Sycamore is a diffuse-porous hardwood, so in theory, it will give sap, and in the spring you can boil it down and make syrup,” Rechlin said. “So I’m giving a talk down in West-by-God Virginia, the folk art capital of the east, and I said, you know, sycamore is a tree that should also make a syrup, but I’ve never heard of anybody doing it. Two ladies in that audience independently raise their hands and say, ‘we grew up on sycamore syrup.’”
The flavor is like butterscotch.
Rechlin spent 15 years in West Virginia, where walnut makes a popular syrup, one with a rich flavor that draws admiration even in the north. Sycamore and walnut are not prevalent in the north, but as the climate changes walnut is a particularly attractive possibility, considering its syrup sells for $360 a gallon, five or six times that of maple.
Of course maple season in itself is pretty hectic as producers greet the public and process the sap from tens of thousands of trees. Instead of tapping more trees, Herfurth said, “sometimes you just want to take a nap.”
Adirondack Harvest members with Maple Weekend events:
61 Sanger Lane
West Chazy, NY 12992
Pancake breakfasts: March 21 & 22, March 28 & 29
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439 Brandy Brook Rd.
Ellenburg Center, NY 12934
Open Houses: March 21 and 22 and March 28-29
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Uilhein Maple Research Farm
302 Bear Cub Lane
Lake Placid, NY 12946
Open Houses: March 21 & 22, March 28 & 29
Be sure to stop by to say hello to Adirondack Harvest!
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1043 Slosson Road
West Chazy, NY 12992
Maple Celebration with Fireworks: March 21
Maple Open Houses: March 21 & 22, March 28 & 29
Pancake Breakfasts: March 21 & 22, March 28 & 29
We’d be remiss if we didn’t include other Adirondack Harvest members that produce maple:
To find stores or retail locations near you that carry maple syrup and other products, please click the button below.
For more information on maple weekend events, please visit New York State Maple Association.
