Leggett's
Maple
Sugar bush
O U R S T O R Y
INTRODUCTION
We welcome you to our website, and invite you to come see and taste for yourself what we proudly treasure as some of the world's finest maple syrup.
Our pure maple syrup has won accolades worldwide. Our syrup has twice been awarded Reserve World Champion at the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and our proudest moment was when our syrup was also twice awarded the title of WORLD CHAMPION MAPLE SYRUP, AND for the FIRST TIME in The Royal Winter Fair's history, our syrup placed FIRST in all three categories of extra light ,light and medium.Our syrup has twice been awarded the title of PREMIER EXHIBITOR at The Royal,garnering 7 of a possible 8 First Place Ribbons,as well as The Charles Corbett Trophy for most points in Maple Sugar Classes. As Joel Haslam of CTV's Regional Contact stated when doing an episode on our operation-"The Leggett's Maple Syrup has won more ribbons, trophies and placques than places to display them."
If it sounds like we are proud of our syrup, we most definitely are, and will do nothing to jeopardize that reputation. The syrup is tested several times daily everyday for quality, and above all taste,any syrup not deemed good enough for ourselves will never find it's way to the consumer, that is our pledge to you.
OUR HISTORY
The Leggett family has continuously been making syrup we believe since 1827,when the farm was first deeded to the Leggett Family. The present day sugarhouse where the syrup is made was built in 1892, we believe it to be possibly one of the oldest working sugarhouses in Ontario, with the sixth generation currently managing the operation and making of the syrup, with the seventh generation helping and learning the process.
The operation first began with old wooden buckets, horses to draw wooden sleighs with wooden holding tanks on them to bring to the sugarhouse where the evaporator is to boil the sap into syrup.The wooden buckets gave way to metal and aluminum buckets which in the 1980's gave way to miles and miles of plastic tubing.
The original evaporator still sits outside the sugarhouse, and has been replaced several times as the pans needed upgrading to more efficient, then more sanitary(stainless steel), to the new high efficiency evaporator which now is in the sugarhouse, still housed inside the original stone arch(evaporator base).
THE NEW SYSTEM
The new evaporator is a Vortex Wood-Fired Evaporator from Leader Evaporator in Swanton, Vermont, and was installed for the 2012 season.This new high efficiency rig exhausts less smoke into the atmosphere than a man smoking a pipe, as all of the unburned gases are used to boil the sap.We use wood only, as it is a totally renewable resource and we are not robbing the earth of fossil fuels.
Once the season is finished comes the process of cleaning up, which we are very diligent about. By keeping our equipment as good as new, we feel we have more quality control over the end product, our maple syrup, butter and sugars. At the end of each season we fill the pans with left over sap, which is allowed to ferment into vinegar and clean the pans as they were when they first arrived from the manufacturer. We use a mild chlorine solution to wash out the tubing, after all we are in the middle of a sugarbush, so we do not wish to dump harsh chemicals into that environment.
We believe by taking these steps we are making less of a carbon imprint on our fragile planet, so that there can be many more generations to come to enjoy making and enjoying maple syrup.
