by Thaddeus Flint
Scattered among the purple mountains of Berlin, Kent Goodermote and Todd Hewitt of Kent’s Sugar House have some 900 maple syrup taps dripping sap drop by drop by drop into long plastic tubes spider-webbing down the hillsides toward collectors sitting at the bottom. This is the first part of the journey maple syrup must make from the sugar maple tree to your breakfast table.
Or your pizza. Maple syrup is not just for breakfast anymore, it turns out. A firm in Vermont is distilling maple syrup into vodka. Amateur beer brewers from all over are adding maple syrup to their recipes for ales and stouts. A restaurant in far away Switzerland drizzles maple syrup onto the tops of pizzas before plopping them into the ovens, the rich flavor caramelizing with the cheese and sausage toppings.
The trip from tree to pizza, or pancake if you prefer, is not a short one. With the exception of the tube pipelines, syrup making is still done pretty much the way it was a hundred or more years ago. The taps are attached to the trees. The sap runs. It is collected, lots of it. The producer will need 43 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of syrup.
“And four cases of beer,” according to one syrup producer in Vermont. The whole process from tree to the bottle can take around 12 hours. Certainly a beer or three could be fit in along the way. But four cases? That’s Vermont for you. After the sap is collected it has to be boiled down to syrup, removing most of the water, which bumps the sugar content from 2.6 percent to 68 percent.
Readers who desire a more in-depth explanation, complete with syrup samples, but no beer, are in luck. Maple Weekend is this weekend, March 26 and 27. From 10 am to 4 pm Kent’s will be open to the public. Admission is free. Goodermote and Hewitt will happily demonstrate the whole process. “People are just mystified,” said Hewitt, “they have no idea where it comes from or the amount of work that goes into it.”
Hewitt and Goodermote have been boiling their sap in the same sugar house built by Goodermote’s grandfather on Plank Road ever since they started in 1975. What brought them into sugaring? “We were kids. Seemed like a good idea at the time,” said Hewitt. The results were better back then, too. The trees need cold nights of around 20 to 25 degrees and then a warm – but not too warm – day of around 38 degrees. That used to be the norm for upstate New York 30 years ago. But now the springs seem to be getting shorter, the winters melting quicker into summers. Perhaps there is such a thing as global warming after all. Syrup producers have very little control over what will happen. Warmer days and nights decrease sap output and increase the amount of bacteria in the sap. Too much bacteria and after the boiling you end up with syrup which is too dark to retail. It goes to the wholesaler at a much lower price. A firm in New Hampshire turns dark syrup into maple candy. Pallets of packed candy can be found labeled in Chinese writing. “There is a huge market in China,” said Hewitt. “They can’t get enough of maple syrup.”
So how has the crop been recently? “Last year was horrendous,” said Hewitt. And this year? “This year we made a little more syrup than last year, but this year isn’t fantastic either.”
Berliners have never been the most optimistic of people. But Goodermote and Hewitt aren’t expecting big profits anyway. “It’s a labor of love,” said Hewitt. That may be why the average age of a maple syrup producer is around 50 and rising. Young people are not attracted to such small returns dependant on the whims of weather. Kids do not want to grow up to be farmers anymore. The number of syrup producers will probably begin to dwindle like our New York springs.
Hewitt, though, seems satisfied to make back the money he needs to spend up front each season on the evaporator, the sap pipelines, the jugs and the gasoline. A lot of gasoline is used for the truck to collect the sap from the collectors. Unfortunately many of the trees are far below the elevation of the sugar house. The sap must be brought back up the hill. So like pretty much everything else, even maple syrup is chained to the price of oil. This year a gallon of Kent’s syrup goes for $48. An amount that might come as a shock to Sarah Watterson, a visiting maple syrup fanatic from the Isle of Man. “I’d fill my bathtub and soak in it if I could afford to,” she said, “syrup is sexy!”
Kent’s Sugar House is located at 2529 Plank Road, Berlin.
Kent’s Maple Syrup can be found at Hewitt’s Market, 40 Elm Street, Berlin.
