Pure Maple Syrup Production

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Today we took a trip up to Portville, NY to Sprague's Maple Sugar Farms. They have a wonderfull restraunt which we eat at whenever we are in that area. Sprague's is mostly know for it's NY State Pure Maple Syrup production and this is the time of year when maple syrup is produced. We took a small tour of Sprague's production facilities to see how it is actually made and even got a demonstration on how it was done in the early days by the Indians. Won't go into a lot of detail about that part but let me say it has to do with dropping very hot rocks into maple sap to get it boiling and burn off moisture.
Anyways..Below are excerpts from Sprague's production web site page describing how it's done.
Maple syrup is made from pure maple sap, collected from sugar maple trees in very late winter and early spring. The sap is a very dilute liquid containing from 1% to 7% sugar, varying from tree to tree and usually averaging around 2% sugar. It takes approximately 40 gallons of this sap to produce 1 gallon of pure maple syrup.
Next comes the tapping of the sugar maples. A 7/16 inch hole is drilled into the tree to a depth of about 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 inches. Into this is driven a "spout." These spouts are rather like modified pieces of pipe from which the bucket is hung or pipeline is run. A cover keeps dirt and rain water out of the buckets until collection; pipeline carries the sap directly from the tree to the storage tank.
To make top quality maple products the sap must be fresh and cold, which means it must be gathered and boiled often. In some modern sugar 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. To evaporate the tremendous amount of water in the sap, a large quantity of fuel must be burned. Sugar makers use a modern reverse osmosis machine in conjunction with an energy efficient 4' X 14' Lighting Evaporator.It takes a long time for the 2% sap to be condensed by the evaporation process to the exact density of maple syrup. If cooked too thick the resulting syrup will crystallize. If the syrup is too thin it will be apt to ferment. Sugar makers use a hydrometer to check the density. When the hydrometer settles in the liquid syrup to a mark designating the correct density, the syrup is drawn from the pan. It is then filtered again to remove the nitre (or sugar sand) which has developed in the boiling process. From the filtering tank the maple syrup flows into small retail containers or into 35 and 50 gallon drums to be packed later. The syrup is packed hot and each can must be sealed according to state laws.