Zainab Al-Medhar
Bristol March 30, 2022
Driving down chem. Bristol, the warm and familiar aroma of maple fills the air signifying maple season.
At Pine Lodge, community members can now come and participate in a new experience.
Pine Lodge has been making their famous maple syrup for almost six years with a small hobby evaporator. With a soft opening on . . .
March 19, Pine Lodge introduced community members to their new structure housing their new Lapierre evaporator where people can learn and observe how they make their maple syrup.
What is unique about the structure is that it was built and milled using pine from their property. “People are just really enjoying just the atmosphere that it creates. And when they walk in, they see the artifacts on the wall, and we’ll just add more as we go along. So everything they see here was in use at one point in time at the lodge,” explained Jodie Thompson, owner of Pine Lodge
“We started small with about 100 buckets on a very small evaporator and just kind of grew from there. We had more and more people that were saying ‘this is really neat.’ You know, and it’s very rewarding to kind of continue a Canadian tradition,” she said.
With a relatively bigger operation, Thompson said they have about 1,000 taps and 2,400 gallons of sap at the start of the season and plan to run the sap until Easter. She and her husband, Adam Thompson, run and operate the family business.
Thompson’s intention is not to mass-produce maple syrup, but rather to provide an educational and recreational experience. After one of their first school tours at Pine Lodge, kids were excited and inquisitive, “It was a lot of fun,” said Thompson.
“Right now we’re mostly a summertime business and we didn’t really have much going on. There’s nobody golfing or camping at this time of year. So it’s kind of a perfect complement, that’s why we really wanted to expand into more of an educational tourist maple syrup production place,” said Thompson.
People can expect tours of the facility, demonstrations on where the sap starts and how it finishes, nature walks along where they tap all the buckets as well as wagon rides, explained Thompson.
Thompson pointed out that they started tapping trees with their kids and once they took interest it was something they continued to do, “We just caught the maple bug, as they say,” she said.
She also enjoys the community aspect of it. Even when they were learning to operate their new equipment, she said people were generous with their time and helpful.
“It’s a real conversation piece, I guess. It really brings people together. That’s why we continued it. We started small and we just kept growing from there because people that we haven’t seen in forever or new people that we’ve never met before just follow the smell and they find us,” laughed Thompson.
Their signature maple syrup is amber or darker in colour, which yields a stronger flavour, they like to cook it a little bit more which makes it special, explained Thompson.
What sets them apart is their ability to have people try their product as it’s being made, but also in their restaurant, “we stand behind our product,” said Thompson. And added that their process is transparent and open for anyone to come and see for themselves how they make their product.
They currently tap sugar maples and silver maples which produce at least two per cent sugar content, and as they continue to expand Thompson noted they plan to do some work this summer to ensure those trees are getting enough sun and that they are accessible.
“We are learning and we’re continuing to grow like we have plans to put in more pipelines next year. But along the way, we’re definitely self-reflecting on every opportunity possible,” said Thompson.
