When we are making syrup, mid October to mid December, we offer tours by appointment and welcome visitors with free syrup tasting and fresh cane juice. You can "Pick your Own" cane stalks for chewing or gifting to friends and family. On our website, we list places where Lee's Syrup can be purchased, and offer syrup for online order and shipment.
We also sell sugar cane in bulk for private, non-commercial use and seed cane as available. Hours of Operation 9am - 5pm weekdays mid October through mid December.
Tours by appointment. A journey across Georgia exploring the fertile and diverse landscape of Georgia agriculture and cuisine. Visit Website. His easygoing manner belies a stubborn sense of determination. In his late sixties, he talked up his desire to sail around the world, and then one day in , he and some friends weighed anchor, returning the following spring, in While they were moored in Salvador, Brazil, he encountered the syrup, and Maybank remembered old-timers in South Carolina who used it during the Depression.
But he actually loved the taste, so he bought one of those street-corner presses and shipped it back to Lavington. He planted his own cane, and he and Ferguson have since been learning the nuances of making cane syrup.
Ferguson was eager to explain the process. Sugarcane is a perennial, but the cane starts to lose its sweetness in about the third year, so you have to buy new seed cane and lay it down.
Each section of a cane stalk has a little eye in it. Seed cane is, simply, fresh-cut stalks laid end to end and buried. Each eye sends up a fresh stalk. After returning from Brazil, Maybank tracked down a few folks in Reevesville, South Carolina, who made syrup the old-fashioned way, growing their own cane and cooking it down once a year, usually around Thanksgiving.
They gave him some pointers and got him started. We think of maple syrup and that sticky texture and candied density. But cane syrup is naturally thinner and only mildly sweet. The five-pound bag one buys in a store involves a series of processes required to extract and condense the sweet into those intense granules. But cane sugar syrup, the first boiling of cane juice, is where it all starts. And what blackstrap molasses is, is a third cook.
The simplicity and naturalness of just boiling cane juice into syrup have begun to attract the folks promoting healthy foods.
On various websites, you can already catch wind of a pro-syrup sentiment, noting that diabetics can allegedly consume cane syrup without a problem, while sugar crystals can set off diabetic shock. Not long ago, when an old but more powerful cane press came up for sale nearby, Maybank bought it even though it lacked one essential part: a mule.
Instead, Maybank connected that part to a tractor motor, which has sped up the process considerably. Once put to a boil in the kettle, the bubbling spume started to throw up the impurities that somehow made it through the T-shirt.
He dipped in a five-gallon bucket—also poked full of holes and fastened to a broomstick—and then let the cooling juice rain back into the kettle. The juice was in a rolling boil, and just as boiling grits will foam up and spill over the stove, the juice can do the same. By late afternoon, the once-full kettle had dropped by two-thirds of its volume. Then that edge of the kettle, where the thickening syrup touches the air, started to change. Now the syrup lapping at the edge left smudges of light brown cream.
Hagood snapped a small stick from some kindling and scraped some goo from the side. Let it cool. The real trick to making cane syrup is figuring out just when it is approaching the perfect thickness. A few years ago, Maybank decided to upgrade by buying a hydrometer.
It looks like a jumbo thermometer, and it gauges specific gravity. To test for that quality, we needed to pull out some syrup so that we could drop the hydrometer in.
Its ability to float in the liquid gave us a number. In one test, it was thirty. The container used last year had broken, so Maybank found an old but enormous campfire coffeepot, one that held more than a gallon, easy. The crucial point arrived at the end of the day, and it happened fast. As the liquid boiled off faster and faster, we approached that special moment. A tension filled the air.
From a nearby bench Maybank watched. They dipped a pan into the syrup old-school and looked for scaling, called for another hydrometer measurement, tasted the edge of the syrup. They sampled another smear of Mary Jane candy. The two paced about like expectant fathers. The consultants crossed their arms in deep concern. Pull the fire! You cannot take a three-hundred-pound kettle off the fire, so you have to pull the roaring fire out from under the three-hundred-pound kettle.
The eight gallons in the kettle were quickly ladled out by bucket brigade and poured into a fresh cotton sheet stretched over a steel box, drizzling through like a tin-roof rain. At a far corner of the box was a spigot, and not long afterward, we had jarred thirty-two quarts of cane sugar syrup. Maybank produced a plate with a few pieces of cornbread on it and poured hot syrup on top of the small squares. Everybody sampled, and even the most skeptical consultant saw that it was good.
The next day, Hagood and I met in his kitchen and decided to try the syrup in every possible configuration we could come up with. His mother-in-law had earlier made some peanut brittle from the syrup for us to sample.
We cooked skewered shrimp brushed with syrup on a grill, and made a salad dressing from syrup. We improvised a bourbon cocktail we christened a Lowcountry Pomegranate Smash. We grilled some elk and some duck breast as well as pheasant and dove that Hagood had shot earlier. The meal was extraordinary, and it underscored what has been lost in the four-century-long race toward sweeter and sweeter sugars. But the more-is-better pursuit of sweetness has driven us to forget the virtues of the milder sugars back down the sweetness scale.
I especially found this with the meat and the booze. Later I tried the syrup in several variations of julep. All my life, a julep was made with a simple syrup derived from boiling sugar crystals in water. My guess is that somewhere in the past, the original addition was cane syrup.
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