I was greeted by Doug Bragg and his wife as I walked in the door. They were only a day or two from beginning the process of evaporating the sap from the maple trees on their farm which occurs each Spring. The timing of this ritual is dictated by the weather. For the sap to begin to flow there must be above freezing days and below freezing nights. When conditions are just right farmers put aside their other chores for 4-6 weeks and fire up their sugar shacks. I learned quite a bit from Doug as he informed me how he boils down the sap to make maple syrup.
While the end result is the same, there are different methods employed to achieve it. First is the way the sap is collected. Some farmers rig up a system of tubing that drains into large collection tanks at the bottom of the mountain. If the land is level (not likely in Vermont) then a vacuum pump is employed to draw the sap into the tanks. Doug, however, prefers to hang a bucket on each of his 2,500 trees and collect the sap from each one daily. He even proudly has a display of the buckets he has used over the years:
The sap is then run through an evaporator to boil off the water content and must reach a temperature of 219 F. Doug prefers to fire his unit with seasoned firewood that has been dried for at least one year. When the sap has reached a specific density it is poured off then filtered and finally bottled as Vermont maple syrup. Here are some of the containers that Doug has in his collection:
Here are some interesting factoids about maple sugaring in Vermont:
1. 80% of the state is covered in forests
2. Of that 80% 3 out of every 5 trees is a sugar maple
3. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup
4. A tree isn't tapped until it is about a foot thick in diameter, or about 40 years old
I learned a lot in a short amount of time. But my education was just getting started.
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