Adirondack Maple Sugaring...a slippery slope

“In contemplating the present opening prospects in human affairs, I am led to expect that a material part of the general happiness which heaven seems to have prepared for mankind, will be derived from the manufacture and general use of Maple Sugar.”

Letter to Thomas Jefferson by Benjamin Rush, August 19, 1791

The temperature outside today is 33’ with winds gusting up to 27mph. Snow is coming down at times in light, swirly dances and then other times I cannot see the house from my “over the shop” studio window, as snow falls in a thick, blizzard-like storm. It’s April 5, 2014, in the Adirondacks. A hot cup of tea is nice to warm the hands, but on a day like today nothing warms me more than a big mug of hot chocolate. I am not talking about a packet of cocoa mix stirred into piping hot water. Mine is from scratch. I take a small sauce pan and set it on top of our well-stoked Glenwood C wood cookstove, which we cook on from September until May. Into the pan I add a quarter cup of 60-100% dark chocolate pieces, an eighth of a cup organic milk, sprinkle 1tsp of Vietnamese cinnamon, a whisper-tiny pinch of cayenne pepper and an eighth of a cup of dark maple syrup. Stir with a whisk until the maple-milk-chocolate mix is melted into a creamy sauce and then add another 2 cups of milk, whisking as you add to get a perfect foam. Keep an eye on the pot, whisking each time to keep that foam, until you see the cocoa begin to boil. Quickly remove from the heat and pour into a large mug, which has been warming on the edge of the cookstove while you cook…or you can share it with a good friend in two smaller mugs. Either way will warm you the same amount. The key to this cocoa, besides really good dark chocolate is the robust flavor of pure maple syrup.

Our Masonry Heater Oven, winter Glenwood C wood cookstove and our smaller summer propane Glenwood

Until recently, we bought or were given our annual supply of maple syrup. So in 2013, we discussed producing our own. My husband Nik and I didn’t enter into this venture lightly. We first travelled in March of the same year, over to Vermont to visit all of our “kids”. Our Son Cori and his fiancé’ Emily, live in a beautiful valley in an old Vermont farmhouse. All around the farmhouse were Sugar Maple trees. Each tappable maple had either a bucket or tubing connected to it. When we walked the back roads, you could hear the “ping, ping” of sap dripping into the buckets hanging on the trees, and the whooshing sound as sap flowed through the vacuum tubes on its way to the large collection tanks. Everywhere you looked was a small sugarhouse with smoke rising from the chimney and steam rising out of the cupola windows and vents. All of this was inspiring but we didn’t like the unnatural look of the tubing lines running through the woods and the large scale production seemed daunting. 

Next we moved on to visit two more of our Vt. “sons”.  Arborist/logger, Ben Rubinfeld and nearby Forester/Logger Dylan Kidder were two of our former mentored PSC students. After a hearty lunch we headed off to unload Ben’s 175 sap buckets on his and neighboring properties. Ben had constructed a trailer that with a large 250 gallon collection tank and front seat resembled a small covered buckboard wagon. Our group, along with Dylan’s young son Cyrus, spent about 1- 1/2 hours emptying each of the sap buckets into 5 gallon pails and then pouring the sap from the pails into the larger trailer tank Ben would later truck over to a friends sugarhouse to collectively boil. It was great fun to get actively involved in the process. 

Ben, Dylan and Cyrus returning from collecting sap

We left Ben’s feeling inspired, yet I must admit that I was hesitant about Maple sugaring season.  It wasn’t the work I dreaded but rather the fact that Sugaring season is the best time to travel away from home.  Besides the fact that you don’t have to worry about the pipes freezing in your house, it’s also mud season. While I was interested in the sugaring season, I still like to leave my travel options open. So a smaller operation held greater appeal. 

While still in Vermont, driving north on Rt 89, we took out the cell phone and called Greg Rossel, a boatbuilder friend living in Maine who teaches at the Wooden Boat School. We knew he and his wife Norma produced syrup for personal consumption and not for resale. This appealed to us. They laughingly told us over the phone that they tap only 6 trees and produce just what they need, about 1-1/2 gallons of syrup each year. They boil right on their little antique three burner gas stove and Norma declared that if she could she would have the tubing run right into the house to the stove to save the time and energy collecting from outside. 

As we were passing through Burlington Vt., we were feeling extremely confident that we, too could set up 6 taps and buckets. By the time we were crossing Lake Champlain by ferry, our discussion had expanded to 10 buckets. At the end of our journey, heading up our driveway we  were up to 15 taps and buckets. This maple sugaring slope was getting slick. 

Nik and I had no sooner arrived home than our neighbors the Browns, three brothers who tapped about 400 trees for family and “fun” called to say they were swimming in sap and would we like to have some to boil. I answered sure and headed over with two five gallon pails and returned with 35 gallons of sap in my pails…and a few borrowed ones as well.  With no sugarhouse, formal or otherwise, we built a fire on the edge of our frozen, muddy dirt driveway over a protruding stump we wanted gone. We gave up an older large pot for the cause, boiled late into the night while a strong and gusty spring wind whipped the smoke and steam around us and at times right into the pot. We visually determined the readiness of the syrup by alternately dripping a ladle full of roiling sap back into the cooking pot to gauge the thickness and just taking sips to deem our first batch “ready”.  We took the pots of syrup into the house and canned the sap in quart mason jars. We produced 3 quarts of unfiltered, woodsmoke-maple syrup. It was the best we had ever tasted. 

We knew we wanted to produce about 5 gallons of syrup. The general rule is that one tap produces about a quart of syrup. Keeping in mind it takes roughly 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup from a sugar maple, we would need about 20 trees and taps to meet our goal. We don’t have any tappable sugar maples on our 41 acres, however, just red maple trees. Of the trees we did have few were large. We determined twenty-five taps would meet our goal. 

Dave tying flies

At this time, three of our recent PSC students we were mentoring, Evan, Dan and Matt, were graduating. Each year these students become part of our family while at college and lifetime members when they leave. College coursework, family, vehicle breakdowns, housing, prospective job and all the myriad of issues one might experience while in college become the focus of our Burrito Night dinner discussions. We tell great stories, laugh a lot and some problems get worked out while we eat or during Thursday night fly tying sessions . At the end of their college stay, we let them host their graduation cookout for their family at our home. It was at this latest graduation that Evan gifted us with 25 maple buckets and lids for our time together.

One of the rules of our PSC mentoring is that current students have to find us replacement students. Enter Dakin and Reilly, who were studying Forestry, and Dave a Fisheries and Wildlife Science student. During the May and June trimester, while Dave headed off to Belize to assist in a Jaguar research project, Dakin and Reilly came over often and helped us cut and mill enough white pine lumber to construct and side the sugarhouse. The rest of the summer Nik and I read all we could on the subject of sugaring.

Dakin fells a tree

I had begun to look at “Craigs List” for a small evaporator. In August I found one near Fair Haven, Vermont at a pastoral Black Angus cattle farm. It was a wood fired 1.5’ X 3’ Lapierre evaporator and hearth, clean and well cared for and at $650 was a great price. The current owners were incredibly gracious and informative and handily loaded our evaporator and stove into the back of Nik’s 82’ Chevy pick-up with a forklift. With a parting gift of a quart of Maple Syrup to fuel our imagination, we were on our way.

Dave, Dakin and Nik Frame up the sugarhouse

The return of our students in September saw us begin our project in earnest. We had created three unpaid internship positions to lend a more professional recognition of their volunteer efforts. The goal of these internship positions was to assist in rewriting our 20 year old Land Management Plan, incorporate a sugarbush, sugarhouse and the maple sugaring production. With plan in hand we set about constructing the sugarhouse.

The sugarhouse would be attached to the opposite end of the chicken barn, an 8’ X 9’ foot structure our sons, as a homeschooling project, had designed and built nearly twenty years before. The plan was to have the sugarhouse measure 8’ X 16’ with a breezeway for firewood storage connecting the two buildings.

By December, we had moved the evaporator and hearth and an 8’ long stainless steel restaurant counter and framed up the sugarhouse around them. We put on the roof, installed a pre-painted window, split and stacked three cords of poplar for the wood fired evaporator and shoveled 2 cubic yards of gravel to create a level floor. For Christmas our friend Rob Carr, the Tupper Lake Wild Center's Exhibits and Interpretive Programs Manager gifted us with a series of Maple Sugaring interpretive posters to put on the walls of the sugarhouse. January saw the cupola, with two pre painted-hinged windows, stovepipe and a set of sliding doors installed.  

Nik and Dakin cutting the roof for the cupola during the first winter snowfall

Nik, new canvass and decorative paint complete,
adding the combing and hardware to the "Peekaboo" Idem sailboat

Nik has a wooden boat restoration business and we were in search of just the right token to give the Upper St. Regis Lake boat owners in appreciation for supporting his local business. A small bottle of pure Adirondack Maple Syrup seemed the perfect gift. We decided to bottle enough syrup as a “marketing gift” from “Nik Santagate and Sons”. 

We had the 25 buckets and lids Evan had given us. It occurred to us that all the volunteer time Dakin, Dave and Reilly gave had to be worth a half gallon of maple syrup for each of them. Suddenly it looked like we were either going to give all our syrup away or else we needed to increase the trees tapped. So along with the 25 buckets from Evan, we acquired through friends an additional 28 buckets and lids to ensure we had enough for our use with extra to share. 

Reilly and Dakin spray paint the buckets

Nik carries the buckets out to the Sugarhouse

I set about making a stencil for the buckets. With Nik, Dakin, Dave and Reilly, we spent a cold and windy Saturday afternoon and spray painted a band of “bamboo/lime” color around each bucket. Next we taped the stencil on the bucket front and went back through and sprayed each with a darker green for the stencil lettering. It was pushing their masculinity “beautifying” all the buckets we had accumulated, but I assured them the effect would be well worth the effort. They were skeptical but willing to humor me. 

We spent the next few weekends doing the last of the sugaring set up. Randy Moody, our mechanic, fit a thermometer in the base of the evaporator. Next we built a platform for our 65 gallon storage tank to allow for a gravity feed to the evaporator pan. We set up a 3/4” water pipe feed line from the storage tank running right into the sugarhouse and reduced the pipe to a 1/4” copper pipe with shut off valve about 2 feet from the stove pipe. From there the copper coiled around the stovepipe, with the intent to preheat the sap before it enters the upper pan.  The upper pan had a shut off valve as well and combined, the idea was to boil, adding more sap at a rate equal to the amount evaporated, adjusting the valves to maintain a steady flow. We fired up the evaporator with water to get the hang of the system, and while the wood burned and the water steamed we cleaned the inside of the building, wiped down the counters, set up chairs and hung up our posters on the wall. 

The Sugarhouse

Nik has an array of old vehicles he manages to “find” like some people pick up stray cats. One favorite is a 72’ Cushman Trackster, a tracked vehicle with a comfy padded bench seat, that nimbly scoots over the snow. He traded it for two truck loads of balsam boughs for use as bedding in an Adirondack Lean-to at a nearby Great Camp.He had the trackster serviced, set a small 12volt water pump on the front with tubing, a winch on the back, a 35 gallon collection tank on the side and a few 5 gallon pails in the storage section. We were ready for tapping and collection time. 

Nik loads up the Cushman Trackster with buckets and gear...ready for tapping

Our sugarbush over story consisted almost entirely of Red maple, with a few Poplar, Paper birch, Black Cherry and White pine.  Assessing the vitality and health of the trees within our “sugarbush” was integral to our Land Management Plan. Collecting data on those tappable trees would provide a baseline for Nik and I as landowners. Our criteria for selecting the trees was simple:
1. Tapped Maple trees must be close to the access trail. 

2. Tap Maples that had some damage and were slated for removal.
3. Tap Maple trees that were visibly healthy and had full crowns.

Reilly our Forester discusses the merits of tapping this Maple with Nik

Dakin measures the DBH

Early Sunday, March 9, we began by slicing maple sapling “cookies”, drilling a hole in the top and numbered the cookies. We headed out to the sugarbush with the trackster loaded with buckets, drill and bits, wooden mallet, spiles, string to hang the numbered cookies, DBH tape, and data sheet in hand. Reilly and Dakin, our student foresters, had gone out with Nik weeks earlier and put bright orange flagging on roughly 60 maples that fit our criteria and they deemed tappable. We set off into our sugarbush to begin tapping from those selected trees. 

We rotated the jobs that morning so each would be proficient in any role. One job was to tie the numbered “cookie” to the tree and gauge the health of the tree regarding crown size and damage. Crowding of the tree or by the tree was additional information.  What form of treatment the tree should receive whether it should be cut, the trees around it should be cut, pruned or just left alone were all factors to be recorded.

Another person measured the DBH (Diameter at Breast Height) at 4-1/2 feet above the ground. Calibrated to measure the diameter of the tree, the “D-tape” measurement gave us a good baseline for the trees we were to keep…information we would be able to remeasure as we later managed the sugarbush. 

Dave hangs the bucket

Drilling the hole for the tap and hanging the bucket with lid was a two man job. We used a battery drill, a far cry from the days of the hand crank or gas powered “rocket man jet pack”. With a 5/16 twisted drill bit, a hole 1-1/2” deep was drilled at an uphill angle to aid the sap flow, the spile inserted and “tapped” into place with the mallet. We had purchased taps with hooks for hanging a bucket, and thus the partner hung buckets and attached the lids.  My job was to document all the data being shouted out…cookie number, health, treatment of tree and the DBH. 
By lunchtime we had marked 53 three trees, somehow losing several cookies so our tree numbers went from 1-57. As we sat and ate a hot chili lunch, we could see the lime colored buckets from the dining room window and all agreed it was a sight to behold. 

Reilly tapping a maple

We sent out invitations for the Maple Producers Tour for Saturday, March 29. The intent was to encourage boat customers and friends to come see the sugaring process. The days had begun to warm and the evenings were below freezing and the sap had just barely begun to flow but there wasn’t much to show for all of our effort. The weather was one factor we couldn’t control, but we had a decent attendance of visitors. 

Sugarhouse invitiation

The following weekend we had a full collection tank ready to boil.  We had been asked to host a private tour with a large family from a nearby Adirondack Great Camp. I baked Paleo Maple Chocolate Chip Pecan Cookies and Maple Blueberry-Strawberry Nut muffins. We carbonated and bottled maple sap and warmed fresh maple syrup.  Dave, Nik and I planned our tour strategy over a quick boiled meal of corned beef and cabbage. After lunch we filled the evaporator pan and started the fire in the hearth. 

Nik describing the boiling process

  Once lit, it didn’t take long for the fire to catch and the sap to begin to boil. Syrup is produced 7 degrees above the boiling temperature of water, so we noted the level on the thermometer and counted from that point.  It seems simple enough, but the process of boiling off the water in the evaporator, adding more sap to keep the level high enough that the pan doesn’t burn, drawing off the finished maple syrup, periodically checking the sugar content with the hydrometer, referring to the thermometer and loading more wood into the evaporator every 5-10 minutes didn’t allow much sitting around time. 

The 17 guests arrived late afternoon. A large genial family, both genuinely interested and interesting, gathered for a brief introduction of our homestead. After “post holing” through the deep snow in light footwear, collecting a few buckets of sap, recording data and answering questions, we bundled all 17 guests into the tiny sugar house and slid the doors shut, like we were playing a game of Sardines. It was interesting to view our production from their professional vantage. There were a few movie directors and producers within the group, one of whom commented that with the smoke rising from the chimney, the large pot sitting on a propane stove atop the shiny stainless steel counter and the steam filled room, it looked like a “set from the TV series Breaking Bad”. The wind blustered outside but once the doors had shut we were engulfed in the sweet steamy warmth, sharing heated maple syrup, cold bubbly sap, cookies and muffins. It was one of those brief bonding experiences where cold weather, opportunity for warmth and food creates fast friends for the moment. We produced three quarters of a gallon of syrup that day. 

Refining the process through taste testing and temperature 

We boiled again for a total of 4 times. No matter how cold outside, the sugarhouse was filled with lots of good humor, warm and at times steamy hot. Dakin found that wearing pants with grommets was not a good idea, but it provided us with comic relief as he danced around when the metal became super heated. Eric laughingly commented that after boiling in the sugar house for hours, “Nik’s face looked like a tomato in the summer sun”. Of the sap collected from our 53 trees, we produced 5.5 gallons of maple syrup. 

Dakin testing and drawing off the syrup from the pan

The filtering process when done by hand is a sticky and repetitive process. We tried many filtering techniques, but found that by direct filtering straight from the evaporator pan as a first stage was most effective. We set up altogether six layers of pre dampened felt and cotton filters, positioned them directly under the draw-off spigot on the evaporator and the syrup sped quickly through the filters and into the stainless steel pail. After the syrup had passed through, we removed the top layers of filters and cleaned them thoroughly in warm water, squeezing out any excess water once cleaned to be used again. Next we poured the hot syrup from the pail, through the layered filters and into the canning pot. 

Once filtered, we again brought the temperature back up above 180 degrees, and with sterilized bottles of all sizes and shapes and sealable caps in the ready, oven mitts on, we opened the pot valve and filled our waiting bottles nearly to the top with the hot syrup and quickly put the cap on tight. All the filled bottles we set on their sides or upside down to seal the bottles and also to kill off any bacteria that may have been on the cap. We left them that way until the syrup had cooled and then gently washed the sticky sides of the bottles. 

Late Spring snow hangs on sap bucket of tree # 53

Part of this project was about marketing Nik’s wooden boat shop and yet I couldn’t seem to come up with a label for the bottles and finally settled with hanging a descriptive card around the neck. The cover was a photo of Maple tree number 53 and stenciled sap bucket under an 8” layer of newly fallen snow. Inside was another photo, project description and the encouraging words: “But remember: You can’t possibly hope to get more syrup next year if you don't return the bottle…and perhaps a boat or two.” 

Eric measures volume of sap in each bucket
and calls out the number to Nik...

The winter snow hung on through April, but the temperature never quite allowed for an extended season so by April 23 we had removed all the buckets, pulled all the spiles out, cleaned up the sugarhouse, and washed all the equipment and collection tanks. The sugarhouse was not only ready for the next maple sugaring season, the space was also ready for summer herb drying, which was just around the corner. 

...Nik recording data

Within our designated sugarbush, we tapped 53 trees in total, and of those trees we removed three. Looking back at the whole process we know that our red maple trees were small, the sugarbush a bit overcrowded, and the “glacial outwash” sandy soil quality was poor at best. Our overall production of 5.5 gallons of maple syrup was a success by our standards. We collected a total of 202.37 gallons of sap. Each tree produced an average of 3.82 gallons and it was fascinating when collecting, to see the range was anywhere from an empty bucket to 2 gallons of sap per tree. 

Storytelling went on for hours, all day...

The one-time, sugaring investment expenses of equipment like the evaporator, books, building construction materials, and posters totaled $3360. In addition our interns were unpaid but the total man hours for the sugarhouse construction and prep were 149 and if paid at $12/hr would have been $1788 and boiling of sap and sugarbush management took 104 man hours which would have cost $1248.

...and on into late evening.

This year has provided us with a baseline for the proceeding years. With better overall knowledge, healthier trees and streamlined process we hope to produce the same or realize an increase of syrup with less cost and effort. The gift giving of syrup to customers of Nik Santagate and Sons will continue next year. We feel that we have a better idea of what we are doing and will have no problem getting the costs down further…if we wanted to. The good humor, camaraderie, visits with dear friends, discovery, excuse to get outdoors and final sweet reward render the cost irrelevant. 

A sampling of the bounty of forest and our labors