While I was in southern Vermont last month, I visited a maple syrup production operation. The actual shed is called a “sugar house”, and the operation is called sugaring, even though the main product is the syrup.
When I was a boy, my dad hung some buckets on taps into the two maple sugar trees in our yard to collect the sap. He boiled the sap in a big old copper tub/kettle set on cinder blocks over a wood fire. You do have to boil and boil, since it takes about 45 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. The other 44 gallons is boiled off by the heat of the burning firewood.
David Franklin’s operation in Guilford, VT (near Brattleboro) is much more efficient than that. The sugar house is set at the base of a long slope. The sap from the taps in the trees goes into tubing that connects into more tubing which goes downhill, so hundreds of trees feed into the long blue tubing shown here, which goes into collection tankage:
The tanks and pumps are arranged to optimize storage and then allow gravity flow into the equipment in the sugar house:
There is a big vat in the shed, around 4 ft wide x 12 ft long, where the sap is boiled by a wood fire kept going in a lower chamber.
The men have been cutting and splitting wood for months, to get ready for the sugaring season. Running this operation takes two or three people. Typically, there is one man keeping his eye fixed on the temperature and other properties of the sap that is being boiled, to make sure that the syrup is drawn off at the right consistency and is not overcooked. The syrup should be drawn off when the temperature reaches 219 degrees F (104 C). Another man keeps a timer set, and every six minutes he opens the door to the fire box and throws in half a dozen pieces of wood to keep the fire burning hot:
There is also filtering and handling of the drawn-off syrup, and checking the tankage outside.
As a (retired) chemical engineer, I appreciated an improvement that was added to the boiling operation. Originally, all the steam from the boiling just went into the air of the shed, making it clammy and causing condensation from the roof to drip down onto workers’ heads. The heat of this steam was basically wasted. But they added a fairly high-tech “Steamaway” heat exchanger that sits on top of most of the boiling vat. The steam rises up through channels of incoming sap from the outside. The cool sap is warmed by the rising steam to around 194 F before entering the boiling vat. This preheating means less firewood is needed to make the syrup. Also, much of the steam is condensed into hot water which can be used for washing operations. A bonus is that much less steam ends up in the atmosphere of the shed, so no more dripping onto heads.
The owner, David Franklin, and his family had the vision for this operation. They built the large shed that houses the operation themselves, and invested in the expensive equipment. David is an old-school farmer, of the type skilled in every aspect of workmanship so they can do their own welding and building and equipment repair instead of paying others to do it. Keeping a large farm running smoothly is a complex task that takes more energy and practical know-how than most suburbanites or city dwellers can imagine. The other men running the sugaring operation are all smart and efficient and hard-working, and all retired from responsible, skilled professions. It seems they do the sugaring largely out of the enjoyment of doing a job well alongside worthy companions.
However, they are all over sixty years old. They can’t keep it up indefinitely since there is a lot of physical labor involved, yet the operation can’t afford to hire young people who would do the work just for money.
It is not clear to me, therefore, what the future of operations like this will be in 15 years, as this current generation of workers ages out. Unlike a lot of production, maple syrup making cannot be simply outsourced to Asia.
Anyway, David Franklin’s syrup is delicious. You can buy some on-line here. Or if you swing by the Franklin Family Farm in Guilford, you can also get some farm fresh eggs and certified organic hamburger, and stew meat.
