In the decade they’ve spent tapping the century-old sugar maples that surround their seaside organic farm, Jon Ellsworth and Jennifer Schroth have become syrup connoisseurs.

“I haven’t even eaten Aunt Jemima since we’ve been doing it. I wouldn’t buy it if it were the last thing in the store,” Schroth said with a laugh.

The couple produce between 50 and 100 gallons of syrup each spring, enhancing its taste by slow-cooking daily batches of sap over a wood fire to produce a liquid gold that is of higher quality than the molasses-like stuff that many Americans associate with real maple syrup.

“It’s kind of like the difference between champagne and heavy beer,” Schroth said.

But it took several years for Ellsworth and Schroth to sift through the old wives’ tales and teach themselves how to turn sap to gold.

Never expecting to become farmers, Ellsworth had studied biology, while Schroth earned her degree in English. But when the opportunity arose to take over Carding Brook Farm about 10 years ago, the newlyweds embraced rural life wholeheartedly.

Schroth had often visited the 70-acre farm when it was run by her grandfather, Maine media legend James Russell Wiggins.

And, for Ellsworth, who grew up on a family dairy farm in western Maine, returning to the land was like coming home. “I just knew, this was what I had to do,” he said.

Today, their two small boys run around the barnyard, pals with the horses, geese, ducks and stout woolly sheep that Ellsworth calls “the lawnmowers.”

During the summer, the couple sells jars of amber syrup alongside the organic produce from a 31/2-acre garden at local farmers markets in Blue Hill and Deer Isle. They also provide fresh vegetables for several area restaurants and retailers.

After the snow falls, Ellsworth selectively harvests timber from their 140-acre woodlot using a team of draft horses.

The first March thaw brings the brief syrup season. “We’ve kind of become a sign of spring,” Ellsworth said.

Neighbors stop by for a taste of fresh syrup, and passersby stop their cars to wave at the couple as they collect sap from their buckets alongside the road. Complete strangers have pulled into the farmyard to watch the sap boil and chat with Ellsworth about how to produce maple syrup organically.

“All winter it seems like we don’t talk to anyone, but in the spring, they just come out of the woodwork,” Schroth said.

On a whim 10 years ago, the couple tapped a few of the stately trees lining their steep drive and made a tiny batch of syrup by boiling the sap over a bonfire.

This spring, they placed 200 taps throughout the neighborhood. Friends let Schroth and Ellsworth tap their trees in exchange for a ration of syrup.

But when the sap begins to run, the Brooklin couple has little time for socialization, spending countless hours emptying their sap buckets daily.

“When you put the buckets out, it takes over your life,” Ellsworth said. “You don’t get to go grocery shopping or anything for a couple weeks – it’s a blur.”

It takes about 40 gallons of sap to produce a single gallon of syrup, he said. The remaining 39 gallons of water is boiled away through hours of simmering over a specialized wood stove known as an evaporator.

The raw sap trickles from a holding tank into a series of pans, kept hot by the fire beneath, and great billows of sweet, white steam rise from the surface.

The slower the sap cooks, the better the syrup will taste, so the owners of Carding Brook burn green hardwood to get the fire just the right temperature, Schroth said. The key to a perfect golden syrup is precise timing – cooking the sap slowly, but processing it before the sap begins to ferment, which can cause the syrup to turn dark, she said.

Processing the 4,000 gallons of sap that go through Carding Brook Farm in a highly productive year is a round-the-clock job for several weeks.

“You can get strung out down here,” Ellsworth said, as he watched the family dog licking syrup off the ground and running in circles. “When you have a late night and you’re down here around midnight drinking syrup, you can get a little jumpy,” he said.

But all too soon, it’s time to start planting the summer’s crops. And when the circle of the year turns, bringing warm days and cool nights to Carding Brook Farm, Schroth and Ellsworth will again be anticipating that first sweet taste of new syrup.

“If both of us went out and had regular jobs, we’d make a lot more money,” Schroth said, bouncing her young son on her lap while she watches the progress of the day’s sap. “But I’d rather be sitting here.”