Michael talks with Josh Bouchard about his awesome Maple Syrup from Spring Harvest Maple Farm! Beara uses it for their Maple Wheat Ale and Mighty (Stong) Ale.

Spring Harvest Maple Farm is a small, family operated maple syrup producer in Barrington, NH. The farm is operated by Josh and Lisa (husband and wife), and our two daughters, Isabella (official taste tester) Danielle (future taste tester), and Nic (up-and-coming Dad's helper) with significant help from our families to make this all work.

I (Josh) went to Coe-Brown Northwood Academy for high school, and first learned about how maple syrup was made in their sugaring program. We tapped about 100 trees and made syrup in the school's sugarhouse. After I graduated from college, I wanted to make our own syrup, so I found some trees, and made a couple gallons of syrup outside on a concrete block arch. I can't say it was the finest syrup we made (a little smokey), but a lot of work went into making this little bit of syrup. Then in 2009, we decided to go "big time", converting a farm outbuilding into a sugarhouse, and we put out 300 taps on tubing to produce 80 gallons of syrup our first year. From there, we've been expanding ever since to meet the growing demand for our exceptional maple syrup and maple products. Now we put out over 1000 taps, and make more than 400 gallons of syrup per year.

We are a mixture of old-time sugarmaking and modern technology. We still put out the old-fashioned buckets and collect sap from those, and we also collect sap via a tubing system in the woods that is connected to a vacuum pump and releaser. The vacuum pump helps the trees to produce more sap, especially on the marginal days. Before we run the sap through the our wood-fired evaporator, we filter it and run it through a reverse osmosis machine that removes 75% of the water from the sap. This process dramatically decreases the amount of wood we burn over the season. We then produce syrup on a 30" x 8' wood-fired evaporator which is fired from storm damage wood we collect from the surrounding area. See here for how we make our exceptional syrup from start to finish.

In our short time, we've also won many awards for our syrup at local fairs, and in 2013, we got a first place ribbon for the best syrup in the State. A lot of hard work, and care, goes into making our high quality maple syrup.

We are proud members of the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association. We participate, and meet the requirements of, the State's voluntary Seal of Quality program. This shows we meet the State's minimum requirements for food safety in the production of maple syrup.