We planned to put it up at the end of the summer, when we first finished the new maple syrup barn, but of course, stuff intervened. We wound up heaving this 600-gallon monster steel tank up into the maple syrup storage loft only after the first snows had come, making it all the harder and heavier. The opening up there was built with this tank in mind (as well as bringing up 55 gallon drums of maple syrup), but that didn’t stop me and Robert from arguing whether it would or wouldn’t actually fit when the moment came. In the end it did, but not with much in the way of room for error.

Robert and I heaved it up onto its small side and lifted it over our heads to the point where the boys could grasp it from above. Problem was, they couldn’t quite reach down all the way to the tank, even standing on its side, so one had to hold the other out the window a bit to grab a hold. It was not a pleasant site to see when standing below the tank pushing upward with all one’s might.

Somehow they managed, man-handling the tank to stick straight out so as to fit inside. Heard lots of grunting and scuffling up in there. While transfixed by this, stairing up at the rising tank, it occured to me that standing 16 feet below this precarious situation wasn’t too clever. Had it fallen on my head, I probably would have dented it. So I stepped aside and took these photos while they walked the tank all the way into the barn’s second floor.

This tank will hold the sap coming down from Hubbard Hill, our smaller bush with 550 trees. We have a new vacuum (or new to us at least) to set up, and that’ll keep us in plumbing for a few weeks to come. On the other side of the loft, we store the large barrels of finished bulk and wholesale maple syrup.

In the first half of the 20th Century, a fellow named Jessie Messier made maple syrup here in a sugar house between the two peaks of Cooks Hill. This is that sugar shack pictured below, standing mutely as I climb the ridges to either side of it, up and down and then up and down again running the lateral line.

Just within five or ten years ago another fellow owned the land and sugared the side closest to the road, but not these trees. He definitely had ambitions of running line way the heck out here; you can tell from the way he set up the dendrology of his line system. To get this sap down to the sugarhouse, we’ll have to run a mainline across a little corner of a neighboring property, but the nice woman who owns that wood lot to the north thankfully thought the idea a good one.

I estimated 250 trees at first in this back section of the lot. After scouting it a few extra times with my brittanys, I figured maybe as many as 350. I’m about half-way done now, and I’ve run line past 341 trees. If it goes past 600 maple trees, I’ll have to go buy more line. It’ll be quite an addition to the main sugarbush, especially as I’ll be able to run it on down to the sugar shack and the vacuum system we have hooked up there.

And we also managed to score some of the new, experimental purge valve tap doohickies out of Proctor Maple Research Center. It’ll be interesting to see if they live up (or down) to the expectations people have of them.

There are two other yet-to-be-tapped sections on the property. Those two might together provide another 1,500 trees, but the topography is such that gravity will never bring it back up to the main sugarhouse by the road. We’d have to run a half mile of mainline down through a couple neighboring properties and stick a tank down by Sawnee Bean, pumping it into some sort of transfer vehicle once or twice a day. With that many trees it’ll be worth it, but that will be quite a bit of effort to get that up and going. Probably next year. Already got it mapped out and the neighbors on board. Once that happens, it’s hard to let the idea sit.

In particular, we bolted on an I-beam just under the ridge beam, allowing a wheeled trolley to slide back and forth with very heavy loads. You can see from the picture on the right that we made the beam pop out the second story doors, allowing us to hoist loads from trucks below.

And given that our 55 gallon barrels of maple syrup weigh about 650 pounds, we added a surprisingly cheap winch crane to attach to the trolley. If this contraption doesn’t kill one of us, it’ll be very handy. Most of our bulk maple syrup, intended for wholesale use, will be hoisted up into this second story for storage over the year.

Once the barrels make it through the doorway, we can drop them onto dollies and push them around. To accommodate this, the floor system up there was built 12-inch-on-center, with heftier stringers than you’d put in a residential structure.

Just because they felt like it, the boys opted to build the barn post-and-beam. Its a pretty old-timey structure, with about all of the design conforming to specific sugaring use. That seemed like a compromise at first, but it’s the more beautiful for it.

Robert and the boys have since thought they  might build these sorts of structures for other folks, seeing how smoothly this one went up. They went and created the site Vermont Cedar Cabins and have been doing some work in this line.

Meanwhile, back at the barn, we need to get the 600 gallon sap tank installed up top. Lots of vacuum plumbing yet to be done. That tank will have a four-inch pipe coming out of it, where we can operate a big butterfly valve from below to start the sap filling up our utility vehicle tank for transport over to the sugar shack. This’ll be quite a tweaking process. It doesn’t take much time for a four-inch pipe of sap coming from 18 feet off the ground to get someone wet. Should be interesting.

I’ve set up a small finishing room in the back, and that’s been working out nicely. We’ll be able to get the barrels up stairs started with heating (purchased a used barrel warmer), and then pipe it on down to get to sterile temperatures for packing.

[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.

[It's easier to remember to turn on the valve in the first place]

That’s when you go to the Thetford General and grab some of those silly chemical hand warmer things that they sell to New Yorkers and Bostonites passing through. Duct tape them to the line, and voila, you have a cleared pipe and a working valve.

I think I’m going to leave that up there so that in the fall the deer hunters will have something to wonder about.

That column of water on the left is hitting the ceiling and showering down all over the vacuum room. I had the clever idea to test to see if I’d hooked up the correct plugs by flicking the sap extractor’s electronic trigger. Well, it worked to show me the plug was in the wrong place. Always good to have someone capturing the moment, too.

Today’s run was very, very small. Just enough for a nice shower. Trees are still deeply cold, although tomorrow’s predicted warm rain might change that.

Ellie and I patched up enough vacuum leaks out in the forest to get the Strafford bush up to about 20 bars of mercury. That’s about as high as I want to go. 30 bars of mercury is the vacuum of space. 21 bars of mercury is about where researchers have shown harm can be done to the maple trees (this, despite the fact that the maple equipment dealers insist that 24+ vacuum systems are harmless – they must just know it in their bones). 20 bars is just about right.

Here’s the scale to go by…

0-13 bars – Not much happens (although sufficient for sap ladder construction)

13-15 bars – You might see 125 percent the normal amount of sap

16-19 bars – You’d probably expect to get half again as much sap as you’d get without vacuum

20-21 bars – You might get 180 to 200 percent of the normal sap flow

22-24 bars – Maple equipment dealers get a warm fuzzy feeling. The trees show larger internal staining.

25-29 bars – Maple logs come screaming down your main lines

30 bars – You are in orbit, and you’re unlikely to be making maple syrup

Back in Thetford Center, I got the vacuum system up and going. It started off at 7 bars, which is par for the course. It’s always interesting to see where it’ll settle at first, once the ice melts for the first time in the year. I was able to patch lines (why in the world would a deer want to chew a sap line when my wife’s perfectly good apple saplings are right next to them?) and see the vacuum level rise to 10 bars before it got too late. We’ll get that forest up to 19 or 20 bars by sap time tomorrow. I don’t even want to calculate how far I’ve trudged in deep snow today with tens of pounds of tools on my back. When Spring flirts with us again tomorrow, bringing with her a bevy of sap, it’ll all be worth it.

[Installing a saddle (interface between lateral line and main line). Hopefully not creating a vacuum leak.]

Robert concluded that it was the saddles we’d put up throughout the bush, as the couple he checked down by the shack seemed to be leaking. He was despondent. I was despondent. Two months of work to fix the old leaky system, and we had a new leaky system. It was dark, and we didn’t have time to investigate or even start to fix.

I didn’t sleep well. Woke up around dawn and went up there to check it out for myself. Found that the saddles were holding pretty well. Found 5 major leaks – mostly your typical sorts of things, such as end caps that were never put in place, or a saddle that wasn’t hooked into its hole.

Came back down after a couple hours of work, and the vacuum was up to 16 bars of mercury when all five mainlines were open to the vacuum. When I shut off one in particular, the others went up over 18 bars, so I know I have some work to do on that one line. Must be a leak or two I missed. We’re going to have good vacuum this year, and that’ll bring in another 50-80 percent of the sap we’d get with just gravity. I am very, very relieved to know that all that work and expense will actually pay off.

In an hour or two, I’ll turn on the smaller vacuum at our smaller bush here in Thetford Center. Will likely see the same thing: terrible vacuum, until we go up into the woods and find what sort of crazy thing has happened to the line over the last ten months. Will actually be fun. I’ll bring the dogs and make a nice walk of it. This afternoon we should see our first sap flow, although I doubt we’ll get to boil today. Gives us an extra evening to prepare and clean the sugarhouse.

[The installation this week of the decidedly low-tech "new" stack]

Very few of them came with directions. The couple manuals that did come with them. turned out to be written in French. Even after translating them, they weren’t very helpful. But that’s sugaring. Part of the fun is the fiddling with the equipment to make it all work together efficiently, causing all sorts of opportunities for arguments and mayhem.

It kept us in the shack more than we should have been and spending less time out in the woods. I’m looking forward to this coming boiling season to get out into the sugarbush a little more often, checking lines and spending less time with wrenches and duct tape.

This past week we had a couple warm days, including a beautiful 40-degree run overnight with mist and rain that must have had the sugar maple trees ready to pop with sap. We and most others were caught out unready to tap (still are), and now it’s cold again. I’m betting on this coming weekend, after Valentine’s Day to tap out. We should be ready by then, even though we still have lots of line work to do.

As far as new technologies we’re introducing in 2009, we have a short list. We’ll have steam hoods this year, which isn’t that big a deal. They came with the used evaporator we bought. This directs the steam out the ports in the roof. We may also introduce automatic draw-off, which is a clever device that senses the temperature of the fluid in the sugar pan and opens up a valve only when it reaches the boiling temperature of maple syrup. This will free up an extra hand in the sugar house, although it does involve a lot of fiddly settings and is yet another thing that could go awry. I broached the topic with the guys, and they all furrowed their brows.

Other than that, our priority has been redoing many of the older lines we use, so that we can get much more sap this year to feed the larger evaporator. We completely re-did our bush in Strafford, expanding it to about 1050 taps, and just this past week started running line to an additional 200 trees here in Thetford, making for a combined total of about 1,600. With good vacuum and a good sap year, this might provide as much as 700 gallons of maple syrup, doubling or tripling our production from last year.

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