What the warmer weather means for this year’s sugar shack season

It’s a sweet lead into spring with the start of maple syrup season.

Sugar shacks like Cabane à Sucre Constantin, north of Montreal in Saint-Eustache, are up and running and open to visitors. 

Ideal sap flow conditions fall between -5 Celsius and five degrees. But Sunday’s temperatures climbed to eight degrees above freezing.

Some say the warmer weather could affect syrup production, and that they are already seeing an earlier harvest season.

“For making the maple sap to come through the trees, we have high temperature during the day and low temperature during the night,” explained Maxime Constantin, the co-owner of Cabane à Sucre Constantin. “So we have to make like 10 difference. We have to freeze during the night.

“If you still have high all day long and all night we don’t have sap… at the old time we take buckets that we come, we take it and we bring back at the sugar shack and we boil it. For now, we take with tubes.

“We take the maple sap from the trees at the back and we come the sap here at the sugar shack that we see here and we make the maple syrup with a machine, the evaporator.”

The absence of ideal conditions is hardly stopping visitors. If anything, the mild weather means more people are paying a visit to sugar shacks. Constantin was expecting 3,000 customers over the weekend.

“We really, really love maple syrup,” Isabelle Menard told CityNews. “We really like to come here because of the animals, so it’s pretty fun for the children.

“We usually go once a year. So it was the first time for us this year and we wanted to of course eat the good food and spend time with our family.”

Beyond the traditional food, visitors said they were there to take in everything a sugar shack has to offer.

“I like the music, and it’s very cool,” said William Dube.

Added Martin Beaulieu: “There is the food of course, but everything is a part of the experience.”

Constantin says his family opened the sugar shack in 1941.

“So that’s a long time ago,” he said. “It’s my grand-grandmother and father who started that. We’re the fourth generation…. We have about like 350 employees who work here during the sugar shack only.

“It’s a really, really cool… time of the year that we love.”