Berkshire Sweet Gold Maple Farm

FROM THE HIGHLAND FORESTS OF THE BERKSHIRES !

Our family farm crafts premium Single-Crop, Single-Batch maple syrups handmade exclusively from our own harvest. A bottle of Berkshire Sweet Gold samples a single Spring day's 15 gallon barrel of pure maple syrup made in about an hour from sap collected from 5,500 Sugar Maple and Red Maple trees in our highland woods.

What happens in a maple forest harvest?
In the forest...
...as late winter temperatures climb above freezing, starches stored in maple roots convert to sugars which can flow in the mineral-rich sap to feed Spring leaf buds. A unique property of North American maple trees makes it possible to collect this fluid which is often around 2%minerals and sugars: carbon dioxide present in the hardwood (xylem) contracts and expands during the Spring pattern of freezing and thawing so that on a warm day the sap, under CO2 pressure, drips rapidly from small holes drilled at the beginning of the harvest. As trees prepare to bud over the next 6-8 weeks, a wild forest fermentation takes place. Dozens of changing airborne bacteria and yeast strains interact with the sap as it leaves the trees through our lines and comes to our syrup house, producing different sugars, amino acids and proteins. These forest processes accelerate with warming temperatures and passing days, and -- along with other natural elements like soil composition, maple tree varietals, and weather patterns-- establish the wild forest flavors that form the basis for maple's variance.

In the Sugarhouse...
...here our farm craft comes into play. With the use of traditional practices and state-of-the-art technology, we bring the sap to 68% sugars and minerals. At the beginning of the harvest, it takes roughly 30 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. By the end of the harvest, this ratio climbs to 70 to 1. Using filtration and evaporation, we turn the sap to syrup. In roughly one hour's time we will fill a 15 gallon barrel with syrup, capturing that hour's growing wild forest flavors. This is what we mean by Single-Batch from a Single-Crop .

By contrast, many farmers blend syrups of varying colors, produced over many hours or days, for convenience or for market uniformity. Large packagers further blend syrups from different farms in mass processing. For example, the Quebec maple federation purchases and centralizes the majority of its 7,400 member farms' harvest for later redistribution. Syrups blended from different time periods, barrels or farms (as in creating a Medium amber by mixing Light and Dark syrups) may be far less smooth and sophisticated in flavor and can develop cloying aftertastes that may limit a syrup's versatility. Our perspective is that over the last fifty years, the public's increasingly narrow association of maple syrup with heavy breakfast foods has occurred in concert with the dominance of wholesale-commodity harvesting and marketing practices like blending. The unique and traditional qualities of each farm’s syrups, each hour’s shifting flavors and thus each color’s many facets, will not survive a blending process.

A role for small family farms
Small family farms can have an important role in supporting a healthy food supply for the public by upholding the flavor variance in a crop that larger, wholesale-driven farms typically must sacrifice for market demands of uniformity. Small farms that focus on such variance can root themselves in agricultural land conservation, attention to biodiversity, concern for organic methods, a pastoral landscape open to public interaction, and fair wages for the family farmer. At Berkshire Sweet Gold Maple Farm we work to bring all these interests together into a fine agricultural harvest that may nourish your aesthetic experiences of food, table, and community, as small family farm foods have done for centuries. Please explore and discover the many pleasures and healthy uses that come from Single-Crop, Single-Batch maple syrups in all their rich variance. Learn more about our farm on this website or come visit us in Heath.

Tasting Notes
The syrups we craft from our wild forest sap begin with Light golden ambers distinguished by striking confectionery tastes and smooth, complex finish flavors. These are followed by Medium ambers' rich, buttery, caramel tones, and then garnet Dark ambers with their robust, sometimes fruity character. Finally, the warmest Spring days of April bring us stout, earthy, full-bodied B syrups which maintain clean yet long and varied finishes, sometimes with a bit of a bite. It is important to note that in this wild woods harvesting, each of these four color categories (Light-- also called Fancy-- Medium, Dark & B) in fact house a continuum of colors/ flavors. For example, some Mediums are almost Light in character and some are almost Dark. It is this variance that our farm works to capture: no two batches of Berkshire Sweet Gold’s Single-Crop, Single-Batch ambers are identical, even when the colors are similar. So, don’t pick one favorite!

Syrup in your kitchen
Maple syrup is likely the only food in your kitchen harvested from the woods in a centuries-old tradition. Maple harvesting is a 400 year farming practice first learned from Native Americans and, arguably, a first agricultural practice for many early settlers to the Northeast as they cleared land for other crops. Historically, maple was not simply a topping for heavy breakfasts; rather, it was a prized, broad-ranging condiment and garnish for meats, vegetables, fruits, breads and drinks. We find that our Single-Crop, Single-Batch syrups have clean up-front tastes and open finishes which nicely balance either subtle or robust spicy, sour, savory, salty, or sweet flavors. Dark syrups are certainly not the only cooking syrups and lighter syrups are not higher in quality than a well-made dark syrup. Recipe brochures are available with purchases and the text is here on-line. The golden fluid contains natural minerals (calcium, potassium, magnesium), proteins, amino acids and trace vitamins (such as Niacin, B5, B2) at 80 calories per ounce (120 for corn syrup, 90 for honey).

All of our glass is imported from Italy. All include gold cord and 4 color tag with the above text about our farm and maple syrup (except drams). Basket also includes a dried flower bouquet. (Dram orders can include some tags if requested.)