Homestead’s 30th Annual Sorghum Festival

Location: Homestead Craft Village in Waco, Texas (see map below)
Date: Saturday, August 31 and Monday, September 2, 2024
Time: 10AM – 4PM
Admission: Free

Watch the entire process as we make sweet sorghum syrup–from pressing raw sorghum cane with a horse-powered mill to cooking the sap into rich, golden brown syrup. Taste samples of sorghum syrup on freshly-baked cornbread made from stoneground cornmeal!

This Year At the Festival We’ll Have:

• Sorghum Pressing and Syrup Cook-off
• Horse-Drawn Hayrides
• Demonstrations of Various Fine Hand-Crafts
• Make-your-own Activities
• BBQ, Brick Oven Pizza, and Ice Cream

Sorghum Syrup

More than 70 years ago, sorghum syrup was a common sweetener on dinner tables throughout rural Texas. Many farmers grew small patches in their fields. At harvest time, they would bring their cane to a nearby farm that had a mill. Families would work together to press cane and cook it down into syrup.

At Brazos de Dios, we carry on this community tradition with our annual sorghum harvest. We hand cut the 10- to 14-foot-tall canes grown on the rich river-bottom soil of our lower land and haul them to our sorghum mill. There, we feed the raw cane stalks through a 100-year-old horse-/mule-powered press. After squeezing the cane, we allow the juice to settle for 2-3 hours in a stainless steel holding tank before channeling it downhill via gravity flow to the sorghum house, where we cook it over a wood fire.

The green juice bubbles and boils its way between the baffles of the hot, 12-foot-long pan. As the excess water evaporates, the juice makes its way to the far end of the pan where it has now become a thick, sweet, golden-brown syrup now ready for bottling.

Be sure to taste a sample of this year’s syrup at the sorghum mill or at our restored Homestead Gristmill!

Stop by to watch and visit. We’d love to answer any questions you have about how sorghum is planted, harvested and made into sweet sorghum syrup.