Somerskogen Sugarbush is a family owned and operated maple syrup farm located in Minnetrista, Minnesota. We have been making 100% pure maple syrup on 17 acres of maple forest since 1994. We started out with 23 taps that dripped into plastic bags, but now have 800 taps connected to a high powered vacuum pump. Every year leads to new improvements and innovations in the sugarbush. We enjoy sharing what we have learned and hope that this website will be helpful to maple syrup makers and others interested in learning more about nature’s finest sweetener.
by Peter
7/21/2011 9:05:00 PM
The main tasks we are doing in the woods this summer include maintaining and improving our tubing collection system. We will be expanding the pipeline a little bit, bringing a couple hundred new taps into our collection network, and hopefully increasing our total production. We have wanted to do this for a while, but it wasn't until we had the Reverse Osmosis machine up and working this year that we felt comfortable that we had enough time to process the extra sap that we expect to collect.
by Peter
4/3/2011 1:08:00 PM
The past several days have been excellent weather for sap flow. We have collected and processed thousands of gallons of sap. On Friday, we made 75 gallons of maple syrup, which is a new record for us. We were excited that much of this syrup was light amber, making it suitable for making maple cream. Hopefully we will have our first batch of cream made next weekend. We have been out of maple cream for quite a while, which has been difficult. For those who have tasted maple cream (which is really just maple syrup concentrated into a spreadable form, sort of like whipped honey), it is a treat that is hard to go without.
It appears that the weather this week will be good early in the week and then turn marginal for sap production after Wednesday. This is because the overnight low temperatures are not expected to drop below freezing. However, with the vacuum pump we should still be able to get some sap flow. We are hoping to be making syrup for at least a couple more weeks, but there is no way to predict how long the sap will continue to flow.
by Peter
3/20/2011 10:36:00 AM
Sap flows on Friday and Saturday were very strong. There was a strong freeze Friday night with a nice warmup to about 46 degrees on Saturday. The trees have finally awakened from their winter freeze and the sap flowed quickly all day and night. Sunday morning we woke up to our 800 gallon bulk tank being completely filled with flow from the overnight hours, which is nearly unprecedented. This means that we collected over 1 gallon of sap per taphole overnight. Overnight temperatures stayed in the mid-30's, keeping the sap lines open. Usually the sap will not keep flowing without both freezing and thawing but we think that since this is the first strong warm spell, the sap kept flowing. So far we have collected over 2000 gallons of sap and processed much of it into syrup. The syrup is a very tasty, dark amber.