How we got started was just my dad’s desire to start doing it. He grew up in a sugar house that was not a family sugar house, but as a young man he tapped trees and sold sap to a neighbor who had a big sugar house. There were quite a few people involved in that operation. Then he never became any further involved with it until I was around sixteen or so; I think I was in my junior year of high school, and dad just really wanted to do it. He had three sons, me being the oldest and I just think that he knew it was something that he would really enjoy doing with us. We had a building on the farm that was vacant and needed a lot of work on the inside but we fixed it up. Then we found an arch with a set of pans that would fit in there, and it was an old rig but we bought it and I think we did about 350 taps or so the first year. The first night we boiled we didn’t get it to syrup. We had somebody in there who had made syrup before and his advice was to not gate off any of the front pans or anything, and we didn’t know any different at that time. The next night we boiled again and there was another sugar maker in there passing his advice along and in his presence we drew off some ridiculous amount of syrup because it had all mixed together so that was one of the first lessons in how many different ways there are to do it. I think we made 150 gallons that year and from a per tap basis that’s still one of the best years we’ve ever had.
We still, and always have used wood for fuel. It’s always been important for us to kind of be, I don’t wanna say proactively low-tech, but we really don’t feel a strong urge to implement all the technology that is available. One of the reasons is that a big part of why we do it is from the traditional stand point of family and friends. For us, it’s a social thing much more than a business thing. So, that’s kind of our choice as far as how we do things and I think that it really does have an impact on the final product. I think that we make really good quality syrup that has a terrific taste to it and I think that it’s at least partially impacted by our methodology. Basically, it takes us as long to make a gallon of syrup as it possibly can. But, I really do think that it has an impact on the taste of the syrup and so we like that part of it too, and we like that the end product is really good because we like the process, and we like the work. My dad really enjoys the work in the woods in January and early February when you get a nice day. He goes into the woods in the afternoons and will start working on the sap lines and everything. When it’s time to tap the trees we go out and do that and from there it’s kind of a team effort with my two brother’s, my dad, and I.
We’re also very busy with our work which is dairy farming. We’re up really early and we have a lot of work to do but we love the fact that it’s during that time of year, late February and most of March, when it’s such a bad time of year to be in Vermont from a weather standpoint. It can be kind of cold and nasty, It’s not springtime yet, we can’t do field work or anything like that, so we’ve kind of managed to find this month and a half where there’s more work to do, but it’s work that we really, really enjoy.
Our sugar house has become a real focal point in the community. There are dozens of people that stop in when we’re boiling that otherwise would just drive by. That easily is the best part of it for us. When we boil, we very much look forward to whoever may stop in. That’s one of the best parts about it. I guess to summarize, it’s very social for us, and we’re pretty traditional in our methodology so we feel that it at least has a role in why the end product is really good. I sympathize with some of the guys that depend on it more for income because they’re more subjected to the wholesale markets and basically what’s happened in the syrup industry is a mirror image in what we’ve seen in the commodity industry in agriculture. When milk producers become awesome at what they do, they produce more milk than what the market really needs and then the next thing you know they’re suffering from depressed prices. And that’s one reason we don’t want to go down that road. We’re already in a market that is challenging from that standpoint so we don’t want to be in another one. I don’t have any desire to run down the guys that are huge, but I really believe that there is an impact that the very aggressively reverse osmosised sap and shorter boiling times has an impact on the taste of the syrup. I’ve tasted the syrup that’s come through those systems. I enjoy cooking and I enjoy good food, and I know that you don’t make a great chicken or beef stock in twenty minutes in a microwave. There’s just a certain impact that the cooking time has on the syrup. I think it’s difficult to quantify, but you can taste it. I can see us potentially making more syrup at some point if we were able to generate more of a retail market because we have plenty more trees we could tap, but I certainly don’t want to become involved in selling our syrup wholesale. It’s just not something I’m interested in. Right now it’s just friends, family, and the convenience of living on a main road with a sign by the driveway. We sell quite a bit that way. We have a lot of repeat customers which goes back to the quality of our syrup.
I have a son that’s six and he’s been in the sugarhouse for his whole life and I very much hope that it’s something that he enjoys and very much wants to be a part of as he grows up. It definitely is something that much like many rural or agricultural ventures, you really feel in your bones. When it’s sugaring season I’ll find myself, as I’m riding in my car, just checking out maple trees. Like if you ride past a section where there’s just this huge batch of maple trees you just think “oh man, look at that batch of maples, aren’t they beautiful!” It’s just one of those things that once your brain is programmed to observe you can’t take it away, it’s not something that’s ever going to leave me.