Mention maple syrup, and New York probably isn't the first state to jump to mind. That would be a northern neighbor that begins with a V.
But graced with an abundance of maple trees, the Empire State is home to many syrup makers. And during the upcoming New York State Maple Weekends, March 16-17 and 23-24, more than 130 of them will welcome the public with tours, tastings, pancake breakfasts and other offerings.
Although maple producers are concentrated in the northern part of the state, a smattering of them are within a few hours of New York City, including syrup makers in Dutchess, Putnam, Ulster, Sullivan and Delaware counties.
Christian Johnston
Glenn Niese, with wife Doreen, is a seventh-generation syrup maker in Putnam Valley, NY.
To get a taste of maple flavor in advance of the visitors' weekends, The Post visited two very different producers: the long-running, family-operated Niese's Maple Farm in Putnam Valley, and Crown Maple in Dover Plains, a 3-year-old enterprise that's taking maple sap into new territory.
Old School: Niese's Maple Farm
Glenn Niese has maple trees on his property that are more than 200 years old, but none whose roots run deeper into the land than his own.
Niese is a seventh-generation syrup maker, whose family has tapped trees on or nearby his maple farm in Putnam Valley since the late 17th century. His great-grandfather started selling syrup by the bucket in 1892, and with his grandfather and father carrying on the tradition, Niese was literally born into the maple trade.
"I was in the sugarhouse when I was in a stroller," says Niese, who, fascinated by the process of turning maple sap into "liquid gold," started making his own syrup at about age 7, on a wood-burning camp stove given to him by his grandfather.
More than 50 years later, he's still at it, turning out up to 250 gallons of syrup each season, largely on his own.
For all the time that's passed since his ancestors first tapped a sugar maple, the basic process — which early European settlers learned from Native Americans — hasn't changed. In late winter, trees are tapped with spouts that extract sap, a watery fluid with a sugar content of about 2 percent or more. The sap is collected in buckets or drips into pipelines that drain into holding tanks, and is boiled down into a sweet, viscous syrup. Which is a lot of boiling — it takes 40 to 50 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup.
Niese's great-grandfather used cast-iron kettles over an outdoor fire; Niese has an evaporator the size of a large tractor that's inside a sugarhouse he built himself using lumber milled from his own trees. A small space, it's lined with shelves cluttered with hand tools, bottles of 3-in-1 oil and Zinc-o-Lube, boxes of empty syrup bottles and rolls of label stickers.
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