[The Not-Very-Quaint Extractor]

Buckets and horses it ain’t. It’s a clever device, and useful in that you can calculate your sap flow by timing how frequently it extracts with its electric pump.

Tonight, visiting our rented sugar bush to see if I needed to turn off the vacuum system due to rapidly freezing conditions, I set down to first calculate the extracting times with a stopwatch.

I didn’t set this bush up. A man named Chaz did, and I came along to rent it from his family after he passed away a few years ago.

[The Sugarhouse at Chaz's Bush]

Our extractor throws about four gallons of sap at a time, so when we see it working every three minutes, we know that we’re running about 80 gallons per hour out of the forest, or about enough to make two gallons of maple syrup. The pump clicks on after 2 minutes, 56 seconds.

Just one test is often misleading, so I reset the watch to restart. Killing time, I start going through the trove of Chaz’s notes from years past. Manuals, sugar line layouts, some day-to-day notes. The notes are precious. They show how this bush’s trees interact with weather and temperature, seasons and how Chaz’s equipment – much of which I use – interacts with the sap to create light and dark maple syrup. He’s written down settings, mistakes, clever work-arounds and even occasionally how he felt.

3 minutes, 9 seconds later, I hear the extractor click the pump on. I could use another data point.

My sugaring buddy and I have been arguing back and forth about whether the season is over, or if we’re just in a dry patch for sap. I start rifling through Chaz’s notes to see when he stopped. He ended his seasons on April 14, 2, 21 and once on March 23, although the notes then indicate “burned the finish pan,” so I won’t count that one.

I hear the extractor pump turn on, so I push the lap button on the stopwatch. 3 minutes, 37 seconds that time, slowing a little.

Some of his notes are prosaic things only another maple syrup maker would find interesting, like the sugar content of his sap (high then as it is now, at about 2.5 percent), and others barely describe the drama I’m sure was involved (”March 20: Leak in flue pan”) which was probably very much like the day, almost exactly a year later, “9.5 inches of sap. Burned front pan.”

The extractor clicks on, and I push the lap button on the stopwatch. 4 minutes, 1 second this time.

In 2003, when Chaz was sick, there are blank spaces. You can see him backfilling dates with temperatures, and once writing on March 24 “Was in hospital since the 21rst.”

I didn’t see a lot of syrup quantity recorded day-to-day in that calendar. He’d put out a gallon of maple syrup one day, a few days later three gallons of maple syrup. The inconsistent boiling took a toll on the grade, with the maple syrup descending to Grade C on March 25. Chaz did a “push” the next day, putting plain water through the back of the pan to push through the remaining maple syrup before he would dump the pans, clean them and start over.

I notice the extractor has been going for a few seconds, so I reset the stopwatch. It was 4 minutes, 30 seconds. A whole lot slower now.

It took three days of boiling after that to get the sugar content back up in the pans, and the first batch of maple syrup must have been frustrating because it was Grade C again. It would have come back up after that, but the weather let Chaz down, turning cold enough to deny him sap for nine straight days, and allowing the sap he did have in his pans to sour. He cleaned again the day before the big runs on April 10 and 11, making a range of Dark Amber, B and then C again.

Those days and the three next brought Chaz 36 gallons of maple syrup, by far the most he’d ever made in such a period. The next day: “Very warm. I quit.” It was 76 degrees outside, a clear day and a night of a full moon.

5 minutes and 20 seconds had gone by. The extractor clicked on. I pocketed the timer and grabbed Chaz’s notes. There was truly a trove of useful information (that, for instance, the automatic draw off device I was contemplating using actually doesn’t work).

[Before Chaz, the Old Sugarhouse Up Atop the Hill]

I peer into the extractor’s input pane and can see that the sap lines must be freezing up. There’s little sap coming in, and the pressure gauge is steadily climbing as ice blocks major parts of the lines. I throw the switch on the wall with a satisfying “clunk,” turning off the vacuum. With some cold this evening, we’ll get some more flow tomorrow, and maybe extend our season one or two more days. It’s April 8, a full moon lights the outside; a fair time to think about stopping for those who would, but I going to decline. I still hold out hope for a last charge of sap in the face of the oncoming spring. We still have much to make up.

The boil we did do, though, was a doozy, with steam coming out in clouds, the wind taking it in all directions, once sending it down Tucker Hill Road and around the hairpin corner, as though it were the ghost of a bus.

[Nice, Controlled Boil]

[Massive, Violent Boiling, Obscuring Smokestack, with Cackling in Background]

The sap coming out of the trees is getting a bit long in the tooth, showing a bit cloudy. This means that the sap has a different proportion of different types of sugars, makes for darker maple syrup and will soon start throwing off-flavors that will end our season. So far, however, the flavor is great. We’ll keep tasting each batch to see when it turns. At least that’s our excuse.

[Our Larger Sap Collection Tank on a Hot Day; Note the Cloudiness]

Some highlights:

- A good deal of what we know (which is still pretty incomplete) about how and why sap flows

- Optimal tapping studies, including depth and placement

- Paraformaldehyde pros and (mostly) cons

- Basics of sap collection, including piping and vacuum mechanics

- Sugarbush management

- Forestry elements, such as optimal stocking

- Some very extensive bibliography information on lots of additional research

- A look at learnings about maple tree genetics and reproduction (still pretty rudimentary)

- Costs and economics of sugaring, including analysis of buckets versus lines

- Wood versus oil and gas

- Use of preheaters

- Employing baffles under flue pans

- Alternative evaporator designs, like vapor compression and tubular evaporator pans

- Marketing maple syrup

- Maple syrup grading history and differences between jurisdictions

- Consumer attitudes (perhaps a little dated) on maple syrup

- Review of older container options

(Kit used for grading syrup samples by color)

Grades of maple syrup probably cause more confusion than clarification. They meant one thing a hundred years ago, another thing five years ago, and now new technologies have yet again shifted the significance of the various grades.

The upshot: the closer to Grade A Fancy, the lighter the color. In the past, those grades also meant “more subtle flavor” to those who liked light syrup and “less flavor” to those who were fans of the darker stuff. But nowadays, due to the new technologies that lighten the color of syrup, there is less of a connection between grade and flavor. This new factor is now reflected in the syrup market, where maple producers are being paid the same amount of money for Grade A Fancy syrup and Grade A Dark Amber syrup.

The Evolution of Grades

Since before the Civil War, and especially during the Civil War, New England maple sugar was the primary sweetener used locally. The country’s poor transportation network, and the great distance to the can sugar plantations down south caused that sweetener to be more expensive. Almost all maple production was made into granulated sugar, rather than the syrup we most often see today. Because this was used in great quantities in cooking, people often wanted to avoid the strong maple flavor, depending on the dish. Cooks preferred the lightest and least flavorful maple sugar, which is why the top of the grading scheme is reserved for the lightest syrup.

Today, maple sugar is sold mostly in the form of syrup, usually for a few specialty purposes where the strong maple flavor is very desirable. Many consumers mistakenly think that the higher the grade, the more maple flavor it will have. An old professor of mine who used to sugar nearby once did a taste test at the local country store to see what local folks actually preferred. He determined two things: that everyone likes free syrup taste testings, and that if people can’t see what their tasting, they tend to like either Grade A Medium Amber or Grade A Dark Amber.

The Destruction of Grades

A very few years ago, some producers introduced a bubbler machine into the maple boiling process, with the intent of allowing air bubbles to create yet more surface area through which water could be evaporated out of the boiling sap. It actually worked, and to the surprise of all, lightened the syrup grade to boot. No one knows why or how; probably something to do with an interference with a complex set of protein reactions known as Maillard reactions that give maple syrup its color and flavor. The sap going in would have made dark syrup, and the final product does indeed taste just like dark syrup, but the bubble process took away much of the color.

Not a lot of producers started using the bubbler machines, but the ones who did install the expensive machinery were some of the largest syrup producers in the country, trying to squeeze out yet more efficiencies in their operations. The result: a huge additional quantity of Fancy syrup that doesn’t actually taste at all like Fancy. Consumers now can’t tell the flavor of the syrup from the color, so grading is more an exercise in tradition than anything more useful.

Alternate Grading Systems

If you think about it, there are two different variables that really matter with maple syrup, after the basics such as cleanliness and clarity are taken care of. There is flavor, and there is thickness. The Canadians put together a “flavor wheel,” that sets out many different subtle flavor aspects together. Using that flavor wheel would make you sound like a wine snob when tasting syrup: “this has a hint of blooming flowers with a woody finish.” Some University of Vermont folks are putting together a less foofy version of that wheel, but I still wonder if it should be considered a wheel at all, instead of merely a list of known flavor possibilities.

Small syrup producers often find that their unique operations produce different flavors than the traditional “maple” flavor you get when you mix hundreds of producers’ products together. These individual flavors can sometimes be especially wonderful, and a few producers are actively marketing their syrup as unique flavors, as do wine makers or cheese makers.

State regulators have long put requirements on a syrup’s thickness, mostly so that customers don’t get cheated with dilute syrup, and thereby hurt the reputation of the syrup produced in the state. Most states call a solution with 66 percent solids in it syrup, and Vermont goes a little further, requiring at least 67.1 percent. That might seem a trivial difference, but it is not. The human tongue is especially sensitive to the difference in texture of fluids between 65 and 70 percent solids, with most people being able to easily tell you which of two fluids is the thicker, even with solutions separated by only 0.1 percent solids.

I have a theory as to why this is. I suspect humans evolved that taste sensitivity because foodstuffs like syrup that are above 67 percent solids have so little water in them that most molds and bacteria cannot grow well in them. Fluids with just 62 percent solids are fantastic places for pathogens to grow, so perhaps those forebears of ours with less sensitive tongues didn’t make it through life long enough to pass on their insensitive tongues to us.

Syrup finished off to 68 percent solids has a thick, smooth feel to it that makes it seem like a meal. Syrup finished to 66 percent feels thin and runny. Syrup finished much past 68 percent solids packs a super flavor punch and thick texture, but over time loses its thickness to sugar crystals that come out of solution, usually at the bottom of the bottle. It’s a special treat that can’t last very long, so people typically don’t sell it. Last year we made a special “Overstrength Reserve” run that proved very popular. It started out about 72 percent solids, and was great sipping straight out of a wine glass.

While I would like to see subtle gradations of thickness be incorporated in a new grading standard, the state folks, when they get around to creating one, will almost certainly use flavor as the controlling factor. This will make grading syrup much harder to do, and less consistent, but much, much more informative.

For some unknown reason, sugar maple trees produce much, much more sap and much sweeter sap than other trees do. The sap is the fluid that brings nutrients up to leaves, and sugars and starches back down from the leaves after they’ve done their photosynthesis magic with the sun. On days when it gets to be about 40 degrees Fahrenheit after a night of temperatures about 20 degrees Fahrenheit, sap wells up in sugar maples.

People collect some of that sap by making small holes in the sides of trees and collecting the clear liquid in buckets, or by hooking those holes up to plastic lines leading to a collection tank. As this is done during the spring’s first thaw, often with deep snow on the ground, it’s quite a bit of work.

The sap – which starts off with at about 2 percent sugar – needs to be boiled down to a higher concentration. Sugarers boil sap on a contraption called an evaporator. It consists of an arch – the bottom part that holds the fire – and the pans, the vessels sitting directly on top of the arch that contains the liquid. Through ingenious fiddling, the evaporator came to have all sorts of features and add-on devices that help increase the rate of boiling. Boiling forces water molecules to escape as steam, leaving more and more of the solution’s solids behind. When so much water has been forced out that the solution becomes 67 percent sugar, it can be called maple syrup.

(Feeding the arch, with the pan above)

At that point, the sugarmaker filters the syrup to take out certain types of tasteless solids that come out of solution and make the liquid cloudy. This is done in small operations with wool filters and in larger operations with devices called filter presses that force the fluid through sandwiches of grit between paper filters. Either way, a big sticky mess is pretty much guaranteed.

Once the syrup has been filtered, the sugarmaker grades it, comparing a small sample jar of it up against the light with some standard samples to figure out which category the final product’s color fits into.

(Grading samples. Note the samples for the year across wall.)

At this point, the syrup – while still hot enough to be sterile – might be packed into individual containers, or put up in larger bulk containers, such as barrels. A gallon of finished syrup weighs 11 pounds (the same amount of pure water weighs 8 pounds), so a barrel of syrup is quite a thing to move around. We find it most often requires the use of both hands.

Sugar farms often sell their syrup right from the roadside, or at local fairs and events. The excess gets sold to wholesalers who either pack it into their own branded bottles, or forward the bulk syrup on to food processors, restaurants and other companies that use syrup on an industrial scale.

Syrup is made in Canada and the U.S., with the American production being only about 15 percent of the whole, and that on a good year. Vermonters make about one half of the U.S. production. We here at <a href=”http://www.tillinghastmaple.com”>Tillinghast Maple are responsible for 1/1000^th of that.

Many hydrometers are geared to give you this reading at 55 degrees Fahrenheit, and you will notice that the table below shows this temperature as the only one not requiring correction.

Temp Density