A Sap for Syrup
By Michelle Kennedy

It took four of us to lift it into the truck. The evaporator. The spinning wheel that would turn the sap from my maple trees into gold. Or rather, amber. Pure Vermont amber-colored maple syrup.

It looked rather benign on the showroom floor, but it was, in reality, a beast of black metal and bolts, and now that it was in my truck, I had no idea what to do next. It came with instructions, this beast (called a sugaring arch and evaporator)—but only for putting it together. There were no instructions on how the sap actually turned into syrup.

For that, I turned to a number of booklets on the subject. What could be easier? Collect sap from trees in funky metal buckets, and then boil the heck out of it. A great way to get outside in these first days of spring. Free syrup for the family for a year, I thought, and maybe even enough left over to sell at the local farmers’ market. The image of those cute little sugaring shacks that dot the Vermont hillside was fresh in my head. We would be real Vermonters, with our own little sugaring operation. Surely my status at the feed store would improve.

Browsing the "sugaring" section of the local hardware store, however, I found there was a lot I didn’t know about turning sap into syrup. The shelves were lined not only with those quaint little buckets and spouts, but with high-powered drills, pumps, miles of plastic tubing, hydrometers, thermometers, collection tanks, collection buckets, skimmers, vacuum sealers and approximately 400 different kinds of bottles, tins and jugs in which to capture the finished product. My head spun and from deep within my parka pocket, I could actually hear my checkbook cringe.

I tried to talk "pro" with the store manager, but it was obvious right away I was way over my head.

"How many taps do you have," the manager asked. I was prepared for this question.

"One hundred," I replied, confident in my new status as member of Vermont Maple Sugarmaker’s Association. "That’s a good amount," he said. "So you already have your grading kit, I’m sure."

"My what?" I said. Then quickly recovering, "Oh, yeah. No, I need one of those."

"Need a hydrometer?"

"Um..." I said.

"To tell the sugar content of the sap?"

"Oh yeah." One hydrometer, into the cart. "Candy thermometer?"

"Sure, why not."

And so on, until my cart brimmed with all manner of filters, labels, draw-off spouts and sap spigots. My checkbook was now fighting desperately to find its way out of my pocket.

The truck sagged with the weight of the arch as we climbed the hill towards home. We were late in getting into the sugaring season and so we had no sugarhouse in which to put our investment. Reading the assembly directions on the way home, I discovered that the evaporator must be absolutely level. Absolutely. No eyeballing, yeah it looks about even, level. Perfectly level on all sides or the sap could scorch and burn turning that beautiful silver pan into the world’s most expensive, one-time-only lollipop-maker.

We decided that the one-sided woodshed would be the optimum place for the contraption, and after three hours of digging into frozen ground with a pick and breaking old bricks with a hammer, we had one perfectly level, though precariously perched, 500-pound firebox upon which to boil our sap.

"You know," my husband John said, "It only takes me 15 minutes and $10 to go down to the store and buy a jug of maple syrup."

The irony was not lost on me, and yet, my desire to be a self-sufficient Vermonter remained. Amber gold awaited on the other side of this agony.

"We still have to tap the trees, you know," he said. Oh yeah, I thought. Tap the trees.

And so the next morning we went into the woods, my two oldest children and I. I drilled, my daughter pounded, and my son hung the bucket. This sounds simple, but lest one forget, all of Vermont is either uphill or down—and all of our trees are uphill. Our pockets jingled with what felt like 20 pounds of taps and our arms ached with galvanized metal buckets.

But as each tap went in and the sap splattered back out at us, we cheered a little, excited that we could make sap go, and it steeled us in our ambition to try for the next tree. After all of the trees were tapped, the three of us sat in the middle of the hill, looking down at our house and listening, not to the birds as we usually do, but to the gentle drip of each of the taps into its bucket. The drips came quickly and then slowed on and off, creating a music I have never heard before. A solitary sound, a sound only known to those who go into the woods in March with drill and bucket in hand.

My husband is a pyromaniac. There’s really no other way to put it. Fortunately he uses his power for good instead of evil and so we have wonderful campfires, grill out almost nightly, even in January, and are kept warm constantly from the glow of our woodstove. The arch and evaporator did nothing but give my husband one more outlet for his passion. Before we even had enough sap to boil, he begged me to let him fire up the evaporator with just water in the pans. He didn’t have long to wait for sap, however, and now every night after work he is in the woodshed, making fire.

The sap boils quickly, and it sustains that boil for hours while the steam rolls off and clouds the shed with fog. After several hours, I draw off the almost-syrup and bring it into the house to "finish off," fearful that we let it boil too long and too hot and have nothing but hard candy for a finished product.

I sit at the stove, book in hand, thermometer in pan, watching and waiting for the magic moment when the sugar content outweighs the water content and the syrup is my reward. I sit and wait patiently for almost two hours. I watch as all of those gallons of sap I painstakingly collected in five gallon buckets, sliding and slipping down the hill, reduce from 40 gallons, to two light amber gallons, to what looks like not much more than a pint or two. But I am persistent and not be discouraged. Reading, doing an occasional dish, but never away from the pan long enough to let it boil over. I hold my stick of butter in hand. At the first sign of boiling over, I am to dab a tiny bit into the syrup, stopping it long enough for me to turn the heat down.

Enter the children.

One quick argument between my five and seven-year-olds quickly sends my syrup past syrup stage and into cream. I turn to find the amber bubbles fighting for the top of the pot and in a panic I plunged the top half of an entire stick of butter into the foam. What remains as I took the pot off the heat is a mere pint of a cloudy, sticky, dense mass one could describe as maple butter.

Fortunately, it turns out to be great on toast.