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The Leslie Sugarcane Festival was held November 2 and saw light attendance. Musicians included Kuntry Mathis and Caroline Salter. Cecil Daniel made sugar cane syrup.

Daniel told what got him into making cane syrup. “My older brother brought me a bunch of cane, and I set it out, and I’ve been in it ever since.” He told how he had too much to chew, so he planted it. He told how he still had too much to chew, so he started squeezing the juice.

Daniel outlined the process for making syrup, telling how he would boil the water off of the syrup from six to eight hours while skimming off debris from the cane stalk. “Then you get to a point where it rise up to 200 degrees. It actually [starts] rising in the kettle. And once it rise, it will sit there for awhile. Once it cool down, it will drop back down. As the water get hot, at 220, 212, it’ll cause the syrup juice to form.” He told how the syrup juice can get hotter than water without boiling, causing the syrup and water to separate. “That’s when you see the action, the foam start rising.”

Daniel told how they got about 8.5 gallons from around 60 gallons of juice, but that the reason they were able to get such a good ratio was because the cane had dried for a week.