Because we are a small, family owned and operated business we are able to focus a great deal on the flavor quality of our syrup. This is harder to do in large commercial operations, where the focus is on the volume produced more than the overall flavor. Our family consists of me (Jonathan), my wife (Stacy) and our two sons (Jonathan, known as 'little Jon', and Caleb), the oldest of which is shown in the picture to the left sitting in a sap bucket. Maple sugaring on this scale is a part time business, so I gather the sap after I get out of work then head for the sugarhouse, ready to boil the sap down.

Depending on the size of the sap ‘run’ we get, it might be 10 or 11 pm before we get to the end. My wife is well versed in all aspects of sugaring, so she can jump right in and help out whenever I’m not there. We produce all our syrup right in our rustic little sugarhouse, handbuilt from locally harvested native white pine and hemlock. In it sits our 2003 Algier stainless steel evaporator, with a forced draft blower.

I guess you could say I’m a second generation sugarmaker, as my father did some sugaring when he was a child, but I’ve definitely taken it to the next level, and I hope my sons will follow in my footsteps someday. I began my maple adventure in 1998 after I had a local forester walk my land to see the kind of trees I had. At that time I only knew a few trees, and probably couldn’t tell the difference between the different maple species.

When I was in my mid-teens, my family began buying real maple syrup in the springtime during ski trips to Vermont from a family sugarhouse similar to ours now. I was struck by how much better it tasted than the “Vermont-Maid” pancake syrup in the store. At that point a thought was placed in my head, and I read some basic books on backyard maple sugaring, and decided to give it a try. We started with about 30 taps, using a tap my father customized to hold a gallon milk jug. We boiled it down using a syrup finishing pan which I still use today, set on top of an old woodstove of my father’s.

With this first rig, making syrup was almost as slow as watching the snow melt. It would take 2-3 days of boiling just to make a gallon or so of very dark, smoky flavored syrup. Yes, it was torturous, but we had the maple bug, so we had fun. The next year I used the same setup, but had probably 60 taps. That was a bad decision, because now sap was sitting around for a long time waiting to be boiled, which is against one of the rules of sugarmaking, which is that you boil everything that day, or as soon as possible.

We got about 15 gallons of syrup that year, and we sold some to family and friends. It was very dark and strong tasting, due to how long the sap spent boiling in the pan. The next year I almost burned my pan one night after I left it unattended for a bit, and at that point I decided just to sell the sap I produced to a local sugarhouse, and take that money and use it to help build a sugarhouse. We began building it in the summer of 2000, finishing it just before the 2001 season began.

It was a fun project, one I couldn’t have completed without help from a good friend I used to work with, here seen on the frame of the building. That year I bought my first hobby evaporator, a 18”x48” Dominion&Grimm. It boiled about 8 gallons of sap and hour, which was 4 times my previous rate. It was nice to see a cloud rising from the pan, telling you syrup was slowly being made.

This rig gave us about 25 gallons of syrup for each of the two years we had it. With each season we try to get a few more good taps, especially some big old trees whenever possible. This began to overburden that rig, so in 2002 I purchased the next size up, and our boil rate doubled, with 16 gallons of water heading out the roof per hour. However, even that rate was still on the slow side, as my tapping exuberance was getting the best of me.

Then last year I decided to jump to the smallest commercial evaporator you can buy, 2’ wide by 6’ long. In addition I purchased a fan for it, which forces oxygen into the fire, dramatically increasing the boil rate. Now we were pushing 40-45 gallons of water out the roof per hour. We had finally arrived at a point where we felt our hard work was starting to pay off.