WHITINGHAM — Outside the Sprague and Son Sugarhouse on Route 100, the sun beams down from a cloudless, blue sky.
The crisp air smells of melting snow and rising mud. Inside the sugar house, steam envelops the sunlight, turning a bright March morning into a foggy afternoon.
The vapor rolls from the evaporator pan to the windows. It condenses. Rivulets roll down the glass. The thick and palpable smell of maple-not-yet-syrup clings to the walls.
A kitchen timer's beep strikes the air. Sugarmaker Marty Sprague jumps into a pit between the woodshed and the evaporator. He shoves logs into the fire that fuels the evaporator. The blaze inside devours the wood. Above, boiling sap jumps and picks up the pace.
Sprague checks a yellow digital thermometer. It reads 218 degrees, today's temperature for turning maple sap into maple syrup.
A festival to fit a community
Sprague is one of seven sugarmakers participating in Whitingham's 14th annual Maple Festival on March 24 and 25. Participating sugar houses will throw their doors open to visitors for demonstrations and samples. Sugarhouses will also have maple-flavored goodies like milkshakes or ice cream.
The festival kicks off with a pancake breakfast at the Jacksonville Municipal Center on Route 100 by the Lions Club. The weekend will also include a crafts fair, maple recipe contest, and sugar-on-snow ham dinner.
The festival coincides with the statewide 11th Maple Open House Weekend, sponsored by the Vermont Maple Sugarmakers Association (story, this section).
“It's my way of saying this is a really nice place to live,” said volunteer Carol Mandracchia about her 14 years serving on the festival committee.
Each sugarhouse has its own way of harvesting and boiling, from using tubing to using horse-drawn sleds, says Mandracchia.
“The festival highlights sugarmakers,” she says. “We like to show it [maple syrup] doesn't just come from a bottle.”
Mandracchia, who views the committee's work as an example of how a small community can come together and accomplish big things, joined the 10-member volunteer festival committee when she moved to town. She wanted to become involved with her new community.
Mandracchia says the committee and sugarmakers have kept the weekend true to the festival's roots - not only highlighting the sugar-making process but also drawing focus to Whitingham's community.
The committee, she adds, has kept the festival a manageable size, with 300 visitors on average attending. Some have traveled from as far as Germany and the U.S. Midwest.
According to Mandracchia, staying small also ensures that the festival remains self-funded. Any proceeds from the crafts fair or pancake breakfast help fund the event next year.
“It [the festival] fits where we live,” she says.
'I'm diversified'
Sprague, who grew up around sugarmaking with his father, built his own sugarhouse in 1994. The family has sugar maple stands in Wilmington and Jacksonville. They manage about 3,600 taps and as of March 14 had boiled about 500 gallons, roughly half of 2011's yield and half of what he hopes to harvest in 2012.
He tapped the trees this year on Feb. 16.
“The only other time I tapped in February, I kicked myself all season because it got cold again,” Sprague says. Without cooperative weather conditions - warm days and cold nights - the sap stops running.
Sprague draws a batch of syrup from the evaporator pan into a second vat, then drops in a hydrometer. It bobs around as he checks the liquid's relative density to determine if the syrup is ready for filtering.
Until recently, sugaring was mostly a hobby for Sprague, who also works at the Mount Snow ski resort two towns north in Dover. The family sells syrup to local restaurants, the Jacksonville General Store, and at the sugarhouse. Family members also make maple candy, maple sugar, and maple-coated nuts.
“I'm diversified, I guess,” Sprague says with a smile.
Sprague's wife Karen and two assistants, Grant Fisher and Dean “Deano” Cusack, also staff the sugarhouse which remains open on the weekends even after the sap stops running.
The kitchen timer beeps, and Sprague leaps back into the pit to throw wood on the fire. Cusack replenishes the wood pile as fast as Sprague can throw logs into the furnace.
“You either like it or you don't,” he says.
Love in a time of low sap
“There's nothing like walking in the woods to find money,” says Sprague. “No sap, no money.”
Sprague says that every year sugaring is different. So far this year, he has boiled approximately 200 gallons of fancy grade syrup.
He drops the hydrometer back in the second vat of syrup. The instrument's red line sits on the amber liquid's surface. The sap is officially syrup.
Sprague ladles diatomaceous earth into the syrup and turns on the filtering pump. The diatomaceous earth flows with the syrup into the filter, adhering to the filter paper and catching any other particles still in the syrup, he said.
Grant Fisher, who drives a truck as his day job, also grew up learning to sugar. Fisher adds he's a Vermonter through-and-through and that an ancestor traveled on the Champlain Expedition in the 1600s.
“It's [sugarmaking] an addiction, really,” Fisher says. “You've got to love it, or you'd don't do it.”
Something you've got to love to do
“There's nothing like real maple syrup,” says festival volunteer and sugarmaker Dana Dix, who learned sugarmaking from older family members beginning in 1972.
“A good 40 years,” he says.
The Dix Family sugarhouse is located on Route 100 south of Jacksonville Village. The family has about 1,300 taps with 600 draining into buckets and the rest through tubing.
He said the family ships syrup worldwide. Many of the shipments go to people who have visited the sugarhouse during the Maple Festival.
In an average year, the Dix family bottles between 240 and 250 gallons of syrup. Last year, an exceptional one, yielded 305 gallons. Last year, the family put up more than 100 gallons of the top fancy grade syrup. This year they have bottled only 50 gallons.
“This year is not a good year,” he says.
In all, as of mid-March , Dix had boiled only 109 gallons.
He tapped the sugar maple trees Feb. 20 and started boiling Feb. 29, eight days earlier than the traditional start for most Vermont sugarmakers - Town Meeting Day.
According to the data logs Dix maintains, the family has tapped in February only four times in 40 years of sugaring.
Dix, who helps coordinate the sugarmakers, jokes calling sugarmaking “an expensive hobby.”
According to Dix, his sugaring operation set him back about $20,000 this season, more than he'll ever make back this year. He purchased a new reverse osmosis machine, which removes water from the sap before the boiling process, and replaced all his plastic tubing.
Learning the reverse osmosis machine's temperament proved a learning curve for Dix, but this year he boiled 50 gallons in 3.5 hours. Before the “R.O. machine,” it took an average of eight hours to boil 25 gallons, he says.
But the faster boiling time has kept Dix on his toes. If the sap boils down and leaves the pan dry, the fire below can quickly ruin a rig that would cost $7,000 to $25,000 to replace.
And, regardless of the season's yield, sugarmakers follow the same labor-intensive process of tapping, collecting, boiling, and bottling, he explains.
“There's a lot of labor in sugaring that people don't see that adds to the [maple syrup] price,” says Dix.
Still, he says, sugarmakers are proud of what they do.
“And sugaring is something you've got to love to do. It's too much work otherwise,” Dix said.
Dix said if the sugaring season ends before the festival he will boil water all weekend to provide a demonstration. But, he adds, visitors can still expect the family's maple ice cream regardless of whether he's still producing his product.
“There's nothing like real maple syrup,” he repeats.
Weather, high tech, and buds
Timothy Wilmot, a UVM Extension maple specialist at the Proctor Maple Research Center, describs 2012 as a “classically poor” year, with a short window of freezing nights and thawing days.
Wilmot said he has not heard from many of the state's 2,000 to 3,000 sugarmakers about their season overall but guesses it's over for most. Even if Vermont experiences another cold snap Wilmot doubts the season will pick back up.
According to Wilmot, when the sugar maple trees grow buds, the seasonal metabolic changes cause the sap to acquire a taste that sugarmakers describe as “buddy.”The flavor is varyingly described online as “off,” “unpleasant,” “bitter,” “absolutely horrible,” and “funk.”
The uncertainty of when the spring thaws will start has some sugarmakers tapping earlier, he says.
Wilmot prefers to leave the questions about global warming to the weather experts, but data collected by the Proctor Center does suggest that sugarmakers are tapping earlier than they did 40 years ago.
An unusually warm March aside, climate change does not fully account for the trend of earlier tapping.
According to Wilmot, sugaring operations with thousands of taps take longer to complete their harvest, so tapping early makes sense for them. Advances in technology have also advanced the season for some sugarmakers, he says.
Research has shown that tapping early in the season does no harm and can prove beneficial, he said. Sugarmakers can miss good freeze/thaw days if they wait too long, but if they drill a tap hole before the tree is ready to run, it's usually okay.
According to Wilmot, a tap hole can remain open for as little as three weeks or as long as 10 weeks depending on the temperature. Warm weather stimulates multi-organisms that cause the tap hole to seal, he says.
Still, a global-warming scenario of a short freeze/thaw cycle followed rapidly by constantly warm temperatures is a weather pattern that the maple industry fears, he says.
“If that becomes the norm, it's going to diminish our crops,” Wilmot observes.
Warming weather also brings invasive species - insects like the Asian Long-horn Beetle, or plants like Honeysuckle and Barberry, both native to Japan, and Oriental Bittersweet.
In Wilmot's opinion, the invasive plants pose a bigger threat to the industry than do pests or weather. The plants can harbor ticks and make traveling in the woods difficult, he says.
The reward
Sprague syphons still-warm syrup, the color of chocolate amber, into small sample cups.
“Deano,” calls Fisher to Cusack through the maple steam. “It's shots time.”
Cusack says he loves walking through the woods during sugaring time.
“It's calm, quiet, and I spend time with good friends,” he said. “It's not a job, it's a hobby and always an adventure.”
The three men toss back their little “shots” of maple. The syrup is heavy with maple flavor, near the end of season, and tastes like maple candy. Sprague, Fisher, and Cusack consult one another, discussing the syrup's terroir.
“I'm sorry,” Sprague says, as only a proud sugar maker would. “It's not fancy.”