Family Says Sense of Humor Helps During Long Hours in the Sugar Bush
Tassiers Make Maple Syrup at Cedarville
By Amy Polk

Dan Tassier places hot jugs and bottles of maple syrup in the candy kitchen to cool. They are packaged at high temperatures to kill any potential bacteria, and the whole syrup making and processing operation is inspected and must meet the Michigan Department of Agriculture's food safety standards. Once the items are cool, they can be shelved and sold.

As a young girl growing up on the McAdams farm near DeTour, Martha Tassier made maple syrup with her family. Years later, when she casually suggested her son and daughter-in-law make a little maple syrup, the idea gave birth to the area's largest retail maple products business.

Dan and Deb Tassier have made syrup at Tassier Sugar Bush in Cedarville for 20 years, and their maple products are being sold in stores as far away as Detroit, Iowa, Arkansas, and Tennessee. They make and sell syrup, maple sugar and sprinkles, candies, maple coated nuts, barbecue sauce, vinaigrette dressing, and the two newest products: Gramma Shorty's Special Sauce and a meat rub.

Every product is a time-honored family recipe, or has some humorous family tale attached to it. Gramma Shorty's sauce, for example, is named for Deb Tassier because of her diminutive height. She usually stands on tiptoes to peek inside the equipment to check on progress during the various stages of making products. The label for the sauce, created by family friend and Cedarville High School graduate Andy Conroy, features a little woman standing on a stool to reach the pot on the stove she is stirring. She bears no resemblance to Mrs. Tassier, but the

Deb Tassier fills jugs, bottles, and jars with freshly made maple syrup, using the steam kettle (at right) in the evaporation room of the sugar house.

family loves the obvious humor used in the label.

A sense of humor has been vital to development of the business over the years, and helps them cope with inevitable accidents like spilling gallons of precious sap on the floor. The family has just wrapped up weeks of late nights, boiling syrup sometimes into the wee hours of the morning. That's the way it always has been, but the late hours are a little easier now on Mr. Tassier, who retired from his full-time job at Michigan Limestone Operations' quarry in Cedarville three years ago. Mr. Tassier's parents, Martha and Jack Tassier, are retired and help out whenever they can. Their two daughters, Tammy and Sharon, have assisted since they were children. Friends often stop by to keep the family company during the many hours they spend boiling.

Jack Tassier checks the sugar content of sap that has had some of the water removed through reverse osmosis. The sap is pouring into the tank through a pipe that looks like a water hose (at left). Reverse osmosis removes 75% of the water from the sap before boiling it down to syrup. The process reduces the amount of time and fuel needed to boil.

Boiling sap is a time consuming process that requires a significant amount of watching, testing, and moving the sap around from the evaporation pans to finishing pans, and finally to a steam kettle for bottling.

Many northern Michigan residents associate the smell of boiling sap with spring. Like Martha Tassier, many other families living near maple groves boiled sap for maple products used in the home.

Evaporation is the process by which maple sap is boiled to remove the water and concentrate the sugars. Sap has a sugar concentration of about 2.5%, and the sap the Tassiers collected this year ranged from 2.6% sugar to as low as 1.3% at the end of the run in April. The lower the sugar content, the longer it takes to make syrup. The Tassiers use a reverse osmosis machine to remove two-thirds of the water from the sap before boiling. The extra step has saved them time and money. Since the sap is more concentrated after reverse osmosis, they use less fuel because they don't have to boil as long.

The Tassiers evaporate the sap until reaches the desired concentration of about 67.8% sugar. When it gets to that ratio of sugar to sap, it creates the much thicker and darker solution known as syrup. Modern evaporation is accomplished in stainless steel pans, with hoods to carry the steam away, creating the characteristic steam cloud seen rolling out of sugar shacks in early spring around Michigan. The old fashioned boiling method was usually done outdoors, in a kettle over a fire.

Maple sap starts to flow when the late winter nights are still cold, and days are beginning to warm. The Tassiers have started the collection and boiling process as early as February, and have collected through April. Ideal conditions are when night temperatures drop down to freezing, and day temperatures rise quickly by 25 to 45 degrees.

A tapped tree normally produces up to 12 gallons of sap during a good year. It takes approximately 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, Mr. Tassier said. Tapping does not hurt the tree, he added, and in fact maple producers work hard to care for trees because their industry depends on it. Syrup producers use only about 1% of Michigan's maple forest resource, the Michigan Maple Syrup Association reports.

A maple tree must be about 40 years old and have a diameter of 10 inches before tapping is recommended. The traditional collection method uses a bucket hung below the tap to collect the dripping sap, but most commercial operations now use taps with lines and a vacuum system that draws sap to a tank. The Tassiers started with 180 taps and buckets 20 years ago. They boiled sap in a two-foot-by-six-foot, wood-fired evaporator under a small shelter in the woods.

"That year we started, we boiled 48 hours non-stop," Mr. Tassier said. "My dad said, if we boil that long, we might as well make some syrup."

They expanded their hobby into a 22-foot-by-28-foot "sugar house" they built for evaporating and packing. They switched from a wood-fired to oil-fired evaporator in 1996, Mr. Tassier said, which saved time and saved them fetching a wheelbarrow full of wood every seven minutes. They are able to boil down a day's collection of sap, between 2,000 and 2,800 gallons, in about four hours, yielding 15 gallons of syrup at the end of the boil. They now have 2,700 taps on 20 acres of maple trees at their sugar bush on Swede Road, and they even buy sap so they can make enough syrup to fill their retail products demand.

A candy kitchen was added to the sugar house. Candy making is a six-hour project, requiring the sap to be heated to 25 degrees above boiling, cooled to 165 degrees, stirred to the correct consistency, and spread into molds.

The Tassiers say the limestonebased soil in which their trees grow gives their maple syrup a "clean," lighter flavor. It actually differs in flavor from maple syrup made in lower Michigan and Ohio, Mrs. Tassier said. She grew up in a maple syrup making area near the Michigan and Indiana border, and she recalls her family making syrup when she was a child. Syrup from that area has a stronger, earthier flavor, she said.

The Tassiers keep busy making their own maple wood crates for gift boxes, a task they picked up after the man who used to make their boxes passed away. Dan Tassier Northern Maple Line, a spin-off of their syrup operation, also designs and installs line systems for other maple operations in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois.

The Tassiers' daughters are now grown and married. Tammy lives with her husband, Matthew Start, in Holland, Michigan. Sharon has been married two years to Frank Marsh, and they live in Sault Ste. Marie with their son, Jack, age 1.