Mark your calendar for our first syrup availability of the year on Saturday, March 12th March 19th!! (Update! Due to inclement weather we have postponed this event from the 12th to Saturday March 19.) We will be selling syrup in person at Molley Chomper cidery in Lansing, NC from 3-6! Syrup will be available both by the bottle and by the case. This is our only in-person event on the books this season, so come to Lansing and make a day of it! Pick up a pizza from Pie on the Mountain and bring it over to Molley Chomper to eat while you sample their amazing array of hard ciders made with locally sourced ingredients and farm collaborations including a syrup/cider colab with Waterfall Farm which will be available on tap and by the bottle. And don’t miss Old Orchard Creek General Store where you will find Hatchet coffee, Stick Boy pastries, and a lovely curation of books and gifts!
For the past couple of years, Molley Chomper has been making a special barrel aged cider with our syrup called Waterfall Farm Maple. It is a blend of late-season apples including York, Stayman Winesap, and Rome. Post-fermentation, they rack the cider in oak barrels and top them weekly over three months with Waterfall Farm maple syrup. This gentle secondary fermentation transforms the maple syrup yielding a rich, sub-acid and near-dry cider with notes of oak, vanilla, and baked apple. You can drink it right away, or it will age well if saved for a cold winter night. This is a dry cider, and the addition of sugar from the syrup in the secondary fermentation bumps this cider to 10% abv which technically makes this an apple wine rather than a cider.
Maeve and Michael at the end of a boil. You can see the days haul bottled and cooling on the back wall.
Today is the 22nd of February and the season has been as perfect as it gets. The freeze and thaw cycles, the high and low barometric pressure, and the snow and rain have all come as if we ordered it that way. Mother Nature has been very cooperative and has us smiling about the forecast for the next ten days.
The new reverse osmosis machine is everything we hoped it would be and more. Here at midseason we have only used 1.25 cords of firewood. That is less than half what we have used by this time in past years. It has also sped up our time boiling and cleaning up, and we are very happy to reduce our carbon footprint!
The early syrup was lite and golden, but short lived. Now it has turned a velvety red and is yummy with hints of vanilla and butterscotch, the distinctive flavor of Waterfall Farm maple syrup coming out of our unique amphibolite soil.
Yesterday Michael boiled a small sap run, about 300 gallons, from the weekend to get ahead of a big run anticipated last night. We didn’t want the tanks overflowing by morning. There was rain moving in and the sap always flows stronger with the low pressure that comes with it. We have about 600 gallons of sap on hand today to boil through. This is sugar season!
