by Bea Peterson
On Monday, February 27, smoke was coming from the Running Brook Sugar Shack in Hoosick. Dick Ogden and his brother Walter were boiling maple syrup. Dick said they have boiled sap at least a dozen times in February, which is rare. Last year, he said, he doesn’t think they boiled twice in February. “We’ve been getting a nice light amber syrup up to this point,” he said. “It’s only now we’re getting the medium amber.” He expects the season will go on for a while yet… it all depends, of course, on the weather.
[private]Ogden said he starting tapping trees the last week in January, though he believes he should have started a week earlier. Whatever, he expects it will be a good season that will probably finish earlier than in past years. Last year their boiling season ran from the beginning of March through the first week
in April. Last year in March the area was knee deep in snow as well.
In recent years Dick has refined the syrup making process saving the brothers, and sometimes Dick’s son, hours and hours of work. Once the trees are tapped the sap runs through plastic tubing into large containers. Some containers hold up to 400 gallons of sap or more. Ogden’s latest purchase is an old truck with a 500 gallon drum on it. His previous vehicle had a smaller storage drum. The new truck means fewer trips to collect sap. He parks the truck near the sugar house, and a hose is connected to a pipe line to Ogden’s home where the sap goes through a reverse osmosis machine where 57 percent of the water is removed from the sap. The sap then travels through lines back to a storage tank on the sugar house where it makes its way into the evaporator. Ogden has a steamaway cover over the evaporator. That has improved boiling efficiency by 75 percent and means boiling lasts about three hours a day instead of all day and all night as in the “old days.” It also means a lot less wood is used to keep the evaporator going.
Last Sunday and Sunday night the sap was really flowing. Dick said one 400 gallon container was filled to the brim with sap late Sunday and again early Monday morning. That is 800 gallons of sap just from one sugar bush or wood lot. No matter how quickly that sap can be turned into syrup it still takes anywhere from 40 to 43 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. So, that most recent 800 gallons of sap, and all the work it entails, will create only 18 to 20 gallons of yummy sweet syrup.
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