March 7, 2020

Sweet Maple Syrup Season

In upstate New York, we have seven seasons; Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Hunting Season, Fishing Season, and Maple Season. And if you are a country boy like me, each of these seasons has its own significance and charms. But while I love all of the seasons, one of my favorite events to participate in is Maple Syrup Season.

The Business of Maple Season

When the nights are below freezing and the days are in the ’30s-’40s is when the sap really begins to flow. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of the maple perfection that we all love so much. What we do not see is the hours of work tapping hundreds of trees and setting up sap lines like a crazy spider web coming down the mountains to strategically positioned sap collection tubs.

I don’t boil any sap myself, but I have several friends that depend on this season for about half of their yearly income. I have family friends that put their son through 4 years of college, with only the earnings from their maple sales. Most of these businesses don’t just make syrup either.

Maple producers also make maple candy, granulated maple sugar, and the highly addictive maple cream. (I myself make some great maple beef jerky.) And if I could pick only one food for the rest of my life I would probably have to go with maple cream. You can really enjoy it with anything. It’s good on toast, biscuits, ice cream, cakes, cookies, you name it!

There is a huge variety of maple products on the market

A Visit to The Sugar Shack

Out here in the country, one thing that we do during the maple season is going visiting. The back of our property is less than a mile from the Vermont border, so I will often follow the scent of the sweet steam billowing from the chimneys.

This past weekend I got in the truck and headed over the Vermont line where I came by a beautiful sap house that was in full swing. I pulled my truck in, parked, and walked in like I had been there a million times before. I knew no one, but before I could introduce myself, my glasses steamed up so badly that I had to dry them off and pocket them.

My lungs filled with the most beautiful warm aroma of maple. I was hoping that no one thought that I was being rude, and they didn’t. I barely got an embarrassed “hello” out of my mouth when a woman put a hot cup of maple coffee in my hand, and another put a fresh maple donut in the other one.

The sap house that I visited was the Mountain Valley Maple Farm in Rupert, Vermont. It is a family-run sap house and it is an absolutely beautiful operation. Two men, a father and son, came over, welcomed me and let me warm by the fire. We talked about the weather, the winter, and when we all thought that the fields would be dry enough to start working.

In the sap house, there were many little treasures to be admired, maple awards from past years, an antique maple tools collection, and a Vermont license plate collection that spanned, from what I could figure about 87 years on the farm.

Maple awards, antique cans and tools, and old license plates

Celebrating Maple Season

Everyone was relaxing, reflecting, and just enjoying a beautiful late winter day. Some were tending the evaporator, some were fetching jugs, and Grandma was making finger waffles for dipping in the hot syrup. The hard work around the maple process was done and this was definitely the fun part, you could feel it in the air. It was like a carnival for the maple brotherhood, everyone was excited to be alive and breathing the warmth.

Everyone was enjoying fresh maple coffee and finger waffles

It was a wonderful day, oh and they wouldn’t let me leave without a nice hot jug of fresh maple syrup, right out of the filler. I couldn’t believe the hospitality! This syrup was pure and full of the love of my new friends and their families.