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Every fall somebody at the farm stand picks up a quart, looks at the price, and asks how it can
possibly cost that much. Here is the long answer. The short answer is forty gallons of sap. -- D.
There are as many ways to make syrup as there are sugarmakers, and every one of them will tell you
the others are doing it wrong. This is our way. -- W.
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The trees. Our sugarbush is mostly sugar maples, with some red maples mixed in.
You can tap a red maple, but the sugar maple's sap is sweeter. That's how it got its name. A maple ought to be about ten inches across at chest height before it gets its first tap, and a
big old tree can take two. Tapped right, a healthy maple gives a little sap every spring for a lifetime,
and then some. -- W.
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Tapping. Late February, usually, so the taps are in before the first run. We
drill a hole about two inches deep into the trunk, angled a little upward so the sap runs out of it, and
tap a spout into the hole, gently, so the bark doesn't split. Every year the new hole goes in a fresh spot,
away from the old ones, which heal over in a season or two. Eighteen hundred holes. In snowshoes. That's
a week, for the two of us and James on the weekend. -- W.
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Collecting the sap. When I was a boy it was all buckets: a galvanized pail
with a lid on every spout, and every pail emptied by hand into a gathering tank on a sled, behind a team,
and later a tractor. We still hang about a hundred buckets on the big trees along the road, partly out of
habit and partly because people like to see them. The rest is tubing: plastic lines that run from tree to
tree, downhill, into bigger mainlines that carry the sap to collecting tanks at the bottom of the hill.
Gravity does the work. From the tanks it goes up to the sugarhouse.
Sap, by the way, looks like water. It's clear and only a little sweet, about two percent sugar, give or
take. Nobody believes that until they taste it. -- W.
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Boil it soon. Sap spoils if it sits around on a warm day, the same as milk.
So when it runs, we boil, and we keep boiling until the tanks are empty. That's why sugaring time is
measured in nights without sleep, not days. -- D.
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The evaporator. This is the heart of the sugarhouse. It's a long firebox,
called the arch, with two big flat pans sitting on top. The sap comes in at the back pan, the one with deep
channels in the bottom for the heat to run through, where it boils hardest. As the water goes off as steam, the sap gets sweeter and works its way
forward into the front pan, getting thicker as it goes. A float keeps the sap at the right depth so the pans
never boil dry, which is the one thing you never, ever let happen.
Ours burns wood. The fire has to be stoked every few minutes, all night if need be, and the steam pours out
the vents in the sugarhouse roof in a big white cloud you can see from the road. When the neighbors see the
steam, they come up to visit. When they come up to visit, they get handed a stick of wood. -- W.
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Drawing off. Syrup is done when it boils at about seven degrees above the
temperature water boils at that day. Water doesn't boil at the same temperature every day, because the
weather changes it, so we check it every morning. When the thermometer in the front pan says it's time, we
open the valve and draw off syrup into a pail. Then we check it with a hydrometer, which floats in the hot
syrup and tells you if it's thick enough. Too thin and it can spoil in the jug. Too thick and it turns to
sugar crystals on the bottom. Getting it right is the whole craft, and it took me about ten years. -- W.
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Filtering. Boiling sap leaves behind minerals from the tree, a gritty stuff
called sugar sand. It won't hurt you, but it makes syrup cloudy and it's not pleasant on the teeth. So the
syrup goes through a felt filter while it's still hot. Hot syrup goes through a filter. Cold syrup goes
through a filter the way William goes to the dentist. -- D.
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Grading. In Vermont, syrup is graded by color. We hold a little bottle of our
syrup up next to a grading kit, a set of small glass bottles of colored liquid, and see which it matches.
The four grades are Vermont Fancy, the lightest; Grade A Medium Amber; Grade A Dark
Amber; and Grade B, the darkest and strongest. Light syrup usually comes early in the season and
dark syrup late, but every run is its own, and some years there's a day of Fancy in April just to keep you
humble. -- D.
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Into the jug. We store the syrup in big stainless drums, and when we need to
fill jugs for the stand or the stores, we heat it back up to about 180 degrees, fill the jugs hot, cap them,
and lay them on their sides for a few minutes so the hot syrup touches the inside of the cap. Then they get
labels, which Debbie puts on straighter than I do, and they go out to the stand. -- W.
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The end of the season. When the nights stop freezing and the buds on the
maples start to swell, the sap changes, and the syrup takes on an off taste that sugarmakers call "buddy."
That's the trees telling you they're done. We pull the taps, wash out the lines, scrub the pans, and sleep
for about a week. Then the grass needs mowing. -- D.
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The Arithmetic
There's an old rule of thumb called the rule of 86: divide 86 by the percent of sugar in your sap and you get
the gallons of sap it takes to make a gallon of syrup. Our sap runs about two percent, so it's about forty to
one, a little more some years.
1,800 taps × about 10 gallons of sap a tap in a season = about 18,000 gallons of sap
18,000 gallons of sap ÷ 40 = about 450 gallons of syrup
This year we made 455. Every one of those 18,000 gallons of sap came through the pans, with about 18 cords of
wood under them, and nearly every gallon went in the air as steam. What's left is in the jug.
So that's why it costs what it costs. -- D.
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