McCreary tapped for syrup festival

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This article was published 13/04/2023 (987 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

McCREARY — There will be liquid gold flowing in the village of McCreary this weekend when the community celebrates the Manitoba maple tree and the producers who work tirelessly to tap it for its sweet syrup.

For the 10th year in a row, McCreary — about 132 kilometres north of Brandon — presents the Manitoba Maple Syrup Festival, staying true to the designation that locals say it received in the 1990s as the maple syrup capital of the province due to dedication of producers like Bob Gass.

There are about half a dozen maple syrup producers in the area whose maple syrup and butter are sold at local farmers’ markets and in neighbouring communities and is packaged for gift and health food stores in Brandon, Dauphin and Clear Lake.

Gass, a retired RCMP officer, has been tapping trees and making his own syrup for more than 50 years, with nine stores that buy from his company, Manitoba Maple Syrup.

Yet he still calls it his hobby.

He has about 1,000 buckets on the go, all attached to maple trees in the sugarbush on his property. A sugarbush is a group of maple trees in the same area that produce maple sugar.

“These are nine-litre pails, and I can easily get 4,000 litres with this many out on one day, and sometimes it might take two or three days to pick them all up,” Gass said.

The trees will only produce sugar water for about three weeks, from mid- to late March to early April, and the temperature swing between day and night must be in the range of freezing to -7 C and rising to 5 C during the day.

“Water from the ground goes up the tree in the warmth, and when it freezes, the water goes back to the ground,” said Gass. “And in that cycle of freezing and thawing, there’s a chemical reaction, and it’s the gases in the tree that push the water out.”

Once the trees have been tapped of sap, the collection begins with the help of five assistants. In his most productive year, Gass collected 1,600 litres, but now he says it’s usually about a third of that amount.

“From a big tank on my truck, I pump the sap into storage containers, and then on a good productive day we can typically boil off about 40 gallons an hour of raw sap. So, it works out to 40 gallons of sap to one gallon of syrup.” Gass said.

McCreary is the hot bed of maple syrup production because of location, weather and preservation, explained Pam Little, president of the Manitoba Maple Syrup Festival.

“Maple trees grow like weeds,” Little said. “And this sugarbush is in an area with a lot of ground moisture, and maple trees like having their feet wet. Also, it’s right beside Riding Mountain’s escarpment, which is a steep slope that acts like a protective wall, but really when Gass bought this land, it was saved of being cleared.”

Festivalgoers will have the opportunity to try tree-tapping for themselves in an authentic working sugarbush this weekend — something they can’t do in the city, added Little.

“I think it’s important for people to see something that has been done for eons. Indigenous people have been doing this forever, and our producers are carrying on their knowledge because they want to share it. So, if you want to know how to tap the maple tree in your yard and make syrup, you can do that at our festival.”

The Manitoba Maple Syrup Festival runs this Saturday and Sunday with pancake breakfasts both days, live music, a makers’ market, and a dance. The full schedule is available at mbmaplesyrupfest.com.

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