The Real Vermont

     Thursday was the last day of my Great American Culinary Tour and I was in search of the real Vermont.  After being subjected to some blatant commercialism I was eager to find some authentic Green Mountain lifestyles.  The day before in my exploration of the tiny town of Rupert I noticed a sugar shack behind a farm house and decided to return to see if the owner was going to be boiling.  So after an amazing breakfast at Johnny Seesaw's I once again drove west and in short order was in Rupert, near the New York state line.  I was encouraged to see steam issuing forth from the cupola of the sugar shack so I drove back the driveway to investigate.

     Sliding back the door I met Michael Lourie.  He and his brother own a 300 head dairy herd which they milk three times a day, but for 6 weeks each year they are in the maple syrup business.  Last year they produced 4,000 gallons of the stuff that they sold in containers ranging from a pint bottle to a 40 gallon drum.  I said that I was there to learn and was greeted warmly and introduced to their oil fired system of evaporating the water out of the collected sap.

    

     Each morning their team heads out into the forest to collect the sap from the tubing that carries the sap into large vats.  It is then stored in huge tanks and gravity fed into the evaporator as needed.

 

     After reaching the proper temperature and viscosity the syrup is then filtered and stored for bottling,  Mike told me.  And as he spoke he offered me a sample of the still warm syrup, just fresh from the evaporator.  It was the best I have ever tasted!   This was the real deal, at last.  I thanked Mike and his crew and left the Mountain Valley Maple Farm with a restored enthusiasm for the Vermont way of life.

     It wasn't long until I spied another sugar shack just outside Manchester Center at the Dutton Farm Stand.  So I pulled in to have a look.  Soon someone from the store came up to let me know that they were behind schedule due to a problem with too much sap coming into their containers.  But I was given a personal tour and explanation of their process.  They are more high tech in that they have a reverse osmosis machine that extracts 75% of the water from the sap before it enters the evaporator.

     They also have taken the time to explain the state mandated grading system for maple syrup and have it cleverly displayed on the wall. 

     I was a bit disappointed that I wasn't able to see their operation up and running but was encouraged again by the kindness of strangers to enlighten me.

     On the way back up the mountain I noticed steam coming from the woods and quickly made a U turn to a small unpaved road and followed it to yet another sugar shack.  This was quite a find and the crowning event of a very successful day.  As it turns out it was a father and son operation and was very basic.  Hamilton and his son, Tom, use an old fashioned wood fired evaporator in a sugar shack barely larger than the unit itself. 

     And they were hard at work at the time I poked my head in the door.  Tom had taken time off as a federal employee in Grand Junction, CO to come back home and help his father with this annual rite of Spring.   

     We chatted as they worked and watched the sap boil down and turn into the golden amber liquid gold of the Green Mountains.  Their system was primitive by the previous standards I had witnessed, but the outcome was just the same.  Hamilton had special ordered glass bottles with ceramic stoppers to bottle his syrup and confided in me that "they cost $4 a piece."

     It was indeed an amazing day.  On my Great American Culinary Tour I had finally found the real Vermont.  I had seen 3 very different maple syrup operations yet they all revealed a similar spirit of ingenuity, pride and self-reliance.  My trip was complete.