Saturday, March 26th, 2011:

Boiling today from 10-5. Grab your Massachusetts Maple Month Passport and stop in for a visit. Don’t have one yet? We’ve got one for ya!

We have pints for sale! $11 apiece. Check or exact cash please. (Sorry! No time to make a bank run for change this morning!)

Cerrado.

Stay tuned! Taps will be in very soon and we may begin boiling as soon as this weekend to start filling all our orders.  The season feels like it’s gonna be a good one, so we plan to have more syrup for sale after those orders are filled.

One of these bottles contains 100% Pure Maple Syrup. One of these bottles contains only 4% maple syrup and 96% brown rice syrup. If you read the labels it’s obvious which is which. If you were to remove the labels, however, even a seasoned maple syrup producer could be fooled as to what might be in the bottle of Log Cabin All Natural Syrup. This is undoubtedly what Pinnacle Foods Group LLC, owners of the Log Cabin brand, want the average consumer to believe.  This is what all makers of imitation maple syrups have always wanted: to put the idea into the consumer’s mind that their imitation product is the same as the real thing, only less expensive.

By law they can’t say it’s the real thing unless it actually is. Anything labeled “maple syrup” must be 100% Pure Maple. The label “maple flavored”, however, is not nearly as restrictive. For all I know, I could call a gallon of milk “maple flavored” if it sat open in my fridge next to a decanter of my own pure maple syrup – but I wouldn’t want to pour it on my pancakes. You won’t find the term “maple flavored” on a bottle of Log Cabin All Natural Syrup, though. This is probably because they felt it would contradict their claim of  ”no artificial flavor”.  The term “flavored” evokes images of something added, and additives have the stigma of being unnatural or artificial. The scant 1.5 tablespoons of real maple syrup in this product is undoubtedly pure and natural, but there’s no room for an argumentative essay on a product label. The fewer words, the better, down to and including using no words at all.

And this is exactly how Log Cabin All Natural Syrup intends to win you over – with no words at all. Their persuasive argument to you the consumer is their packaging, and their packaging has always been an attempt at misdirection. Walk past the selection of table syrups at your grocery and tell me how many of them are packaged in clear bottles. All of them (until now).  Clear bottles let you see the very maple looking artificially colored product inside. If they can get you to think, at first glance, that their product is the same as the real thing then your next question is simply going to be “Which is cheaper?”, a battle they will always win.

The current packaging for Log Cabin All Natural Syrup is just the next generation in the marketing shell game. They have packaged their product, (which in their defense does not actually claim in words to be maple syrup) into a container whose color, shape and style has ever only been associated with 100% Pure Maple Syrup.  I’m not even sure that I can come up with an apt analogy for this move, other than to say that if I were to put iced tea into a Jack Daniels style bottle and gave it a black label with white letters – you’d almost certainly be at the party before you realized that the contents of that bottle aren’t going to help you forget your crappy day.  A picture is worth a thousand words, and Log Cabin’s hope is that the mental picture of their product packaging is worth every last one of the thousand words you have ever associated with 100% Pure Maple Syrup. Add to this their paid placement of their product alongside jugs and bottles of the real thing, and their battle for your dollar is effectively won, without saying a single word, or running afoul of any existing law. What Log Cabin has done is genius, but evil genius.  To maple producers, it’s just insidious.

Pinnacle Foods is not likely to listen to the concerns of those whose livelihood they’re undercutting, but your local grocery store will. If the major grocery chains receive enough negative press about their role in this duplicity, they will be obliged to make it go away by simply shelving the Log Cabin All Natural Syrup where it belongs – with the  rest of the maple flavored table syrups.

Here are the details:

• Choose from 4 container sizes (1/2 gallon, quart, pint, 1/2 pint), and your choice of quantity. Pre-ordering prices can be found on our Products page.
• Send an email to occasionalcreekmaple@gmail.com and let us know how many jugs you would like, and what sizes.
• We will send you an invoice for your order total through PayPal. This is the prefered method of payment for pre-orders. (You can make a payment with a credit or debit card on PayPal without having to sign up for an account.)
• If you need to pay by cash or check, or if your name is Inigo Montoya and PayPal killed your father, we understand.  Please include that info in your original email.
• Your syrup will be available for pickup at the sugar shack approximately one week after we begin boiling. We will contact you to let you know exactly when we’ve bottled our first round.
• If you live too far away to pick up your order, we can mail it to you. Send us your mailing address in your original email so we can calculate the exact, least expensive shipping cost. We’ll ship it as soon as it’s produced.
• You are guaranteed to get the syrup you paid for. We are only pre-selling a conservative portion of what we expect to produce, so even if the season is a small one, we will still make enough to cover your order. In the event of a catastrophe that prevents us from making any syrup, we will refund your money.
• Pre-ordering will end for certain on the day we begin boiling – (likely no later than March 1st, but possibly as early as the last week of February) -or when we sell through the volume we’ve set aside for pre-orders.

Last year, this was a big success for us and our friends. We hope you can take advantage of the offer this year, and we thank you for your continued support.

Pinnacle Foods Group LLC, distributors of the Log Cabin brand and the manufacturers of this abomination, do not make real maple syrup. They make a maple flavored (and I will debate that claim later) table syrup by combining commodity food ingredients.

For now, I just want to take a look at what’s in this bottle, and how those ingredients stand up to the claims.

This syrup is made from rice? What is this, Budweiser?

The bottle claims “All Natural. No artificial flavors or colors. No high fructose corn syrup or preservatives.” Let’s look at that.

• Xantham Gum – sugars, likely derived from corn, fermented by a bacteria, precipitated using isopropyl alcohol (poison, by the way), dried, and then reconstituted. Not natural. Certainly artificial.
• Natural Flavor – Flavor of what, exactly? Rancid meat is a natural flavor.
• Caramel Color – The caramel color in pure maple syrup comes from the actual caramelization of the sugars in the maple sap during boiling. That’s a natural color. The caramel color in this syrup is an additive, derived from the heat treatment of sugars, usually glucose or fructose. If you have to add a color, isn’t that unnatural?
• Citric Acid – a preservative.
• Syrup – since the first ingredient of this ingredient is brown rice, it’s a good guess that this is brown rice syrup. It may not be HFCS, but the maltose in it will hit your blood stream even faster. It’s not nearly as sweet as high fructose corn syrup, though.  Hence the addition of more…
• Sugar – but what kind of sugar? Apparently they don’t have to say. It could be the fructose you thought you were avoiding.
• Maple – So, if this product already has two different kinds of sugar, caramel color and a natural flavoring… why does it even need to contain maple?

Their claims look pretty thin, right down to the claim of  ”all natural”.  I can remember when the word organic was just an adjective. Now, it’s a label – a very expensive and strictly defined and controlled label.  Natural is today what organic was back then. The FDA currently has no definition for the term “natural”. So just keep this in mind: since natural isn’t what the FDA says it is, it can conceivably be anything that Log Cabin says it is. They don’t say it because it’s true. They say it because they can.

Do you want to know what goes into the pure maple syrup I sell? Come down when we’re boiling and I’ll will actually show you. Want to know what goes into Log Cabin’s All Natural Syrup? Stop by a Pinnacle Foods facility some time and find out if they’re as accomodating, or forthcoming.

During a normal year, we’d still be collecting and boiling sap right now, but this has been anything but a normal year. Total syrup production this year is way down, almost a third of what it was just two years ago. That’s not just me. That’s me and almost everyone I’ve talked to. I understand that a handful of luckily placed sugarers had an okay season, but still below average. This is farming, plain and simple. We’re at the mercy of the weather for a very short period of time, and nothing we do can change what Mother Nature decides to throw our way. This year she threw us next to nothing.

Nothing left to do now but the wrap up and the clean up. I’ve still got between 5 and 10 gallons of “sweet” (sap that’s no longer sap, but not quite syrup) to finish off on the propane burner. For an operation my size, it’s just not worth firing up the evaporator for what? an hour? Besides, babysitting a propane fired pot is a lot less stressful than a wood fired evap. So I have some relaxing zen-time coming up.

The storage tank has been drained of sap and it now getting a bleach soak, with a disposable mop scrub in its future. The buckets still need to be collected and the lines taken down and flushed. I’ll do that… later. But not too later. It’s a very wet job, and I’m enjoying my current state of warm and dry too much right now.

So, I may have 3 gallons of syrup left when all the finishing is done.  Whatever it comes down to, it’ll all be packaged into pint bottles and sold off as we find buyers. According to the law of supply and demand, those pints will be going for $12. I feel about as bad about that as the $18 pints I saw at Whole Foods this afternoon. If you bought your syrup from us during the pre-sales this year, you got a heck of a deal. We’ve had a few requests (from individuals through the Facebook group)  for syrup as it becomes available. We know who you are and we’ll do our best to get it into your hands. If there’s any left after we exhaust our local outlets, you’ll see it here for sale. Just don’t hold your breath. I don’t want to be held responsible for that.

Soooo, since I have more free time on the weekends anyway, I’m gonna tank the sap and boil then. Besides, I can’t use the evaporator  right now anyway. The gasket on the door fell off, and without it the whole shack fills up with smoke. I tolerated it for 5 hours yesterday, but that’s my limit. I need a new tube of high temperature caulk to fix it, and a trip to Home Depot was a total loss on that front, despite the fact that it’s Home. Frakkin’. Depot. Well,  my local Ace Hardware carries what I need, and a quick trip by there in the morning will set me up.

For now, I am so very tired. G’nite.

Umm….. I haven’t forgotten about you. Really I haven’t.

So where are we? I’d say we were at the start of a pretty good season. We’ve made 2 3/4 gallons of syrup so far and have filled all but 3 of our pre-orders. The evaporator is humming, averaging about a 5 gallon per hour evaporation rate. What that means right now is that as long as I have sap to feed it, I can make a gallon of syrup every, oh, 6 to 7 hours. So far, it’s the lightest syrup I’ve ever made! That’s what happens when you don’t boil it all in a single pot for an entire week. I’m not trash talking. It’s where I’ve come from… I’m not denying it. But this way is SOOOO much better. And the cool factor is off the scale.

I look like I’m making syrup now, not…. boiling pasta.

Here’s the last picture I took of the evaporator: Very steampunk, no? Neither of those thermometers actually work, which makes it authentic steampunk, I think. The large one needs to have more of its probe in contact with the syrup, which I can’t do now, and the other one I bent for reasons that were not stupid to me at the time, and now it’s broke. I’m using a much better digital wireless thermometer now. I’d be lost without it. That’s a metaphor. In reality, I’d be burning syrup without it.

I cobbled a blower into the draft door to keep the fire red-hot. It worked, but all that heat is warping the door something awful. That bottom right corner can spit fire like a dragon now. She’ll get me through the season, though.

The weather really wasn’t cooperating this past week. I went three days with no sap at all. I believe the trees actually went into the buckets and took sap back. That’s how dry it was. Saturday and Sunday were perfect. Warm days after freezing nights, but most importantly – bright, warm, direct sun on the trees. They love it. And so do I.

Today was spent trying to tie up all the loose ends. I put in 27 taps in the past two days and the sap is flowing, and it is sweet (over 3%!). I’m going to need to start boiling soon. Very soon. Tonite? Ehhhhhh…. probably not. Tomorrow? Let’s just say all I need is a gentle push in that direction.

I had to take most of the bricks out of the evaporator so I could move it. I had to move it so I could install the cement board around the stack in the back (<– rhyme unintentional, but still fun). I had to install the cement board so that I don’t overheat the back wall and set FIRE to my sugar house.

And why bricks, you ask? Well, when the evaporator really gets boiling, it will start shaking like an unbalanced washing machine, and I need all those bricks to weigh it down and keep it from walking out the door…. Okay that’s a lie, but it’s much more exciting than the truth. The bricks are really there for insulation. They help force the heat from the fire up and into the pan full of sap. I should be using “fire brick” that’s made for this kind of thing, and can withstand thousands of degrees of heat, and conducts very little heat, and is not cheap. Instead I’m using run of the mill red clay brick. The heat will likely destroy them during the course of the season, but the price is right: free.

What else? I cobbled together and installed a metal bracket to hold the weight of the stack on the outside of the sugar house. I hung some old computer speakers so I can hook up the laptop and have some tunes. I can pick up the Wi-Fi from the house out in the sugar house. Did I mention that? No? Well I should have, because it’s wicked cool. I gave my pan a test fill, then took them out and rinsed them clean. Finally, I collected the last 2 days worth of sap and dumped it in the tank. And when I done pouring and still heard splashing, I cursed and closed the drain valve at the bottom of the tank.

Using MATH!, I’ve measured the sap in the tank at 13 gallons. I took a specific gravity reading and after some more MATH! I’ve determined that the sugar content of that sap is somewhere between 3.5 and 4%! In terms you can better understand, that’s kind of like expecting a shiny Sacagawea and getting a freakin’ bar of gold. I need to have my hydrometer checked, cuz that just can’t possibly be right.

If it is…. it’s party time.