Let's play word association, shall we?
Vermont.
Who said maple syrup?
I did.
A couple months ago I hadn't thought about Vermont as a vacation destination in...well, forever. When it started to be a serious candidate as a substitute for a scuttled trip to Maine (which replaced Costa Rica), the first thing that came to my mind about that state was pouring sweet maple syrup on a pile of fluffy pancakes. Now that I know a little more about the Green Mountain State based on a half week doing a little exploring and a lot more time than that researching where to go and what to do, maple syrup is still the first thing I think of when I hear the name Vermont.
Call it fate, karma, destiny, kismet, divine providence or whatever else you might want to call it but I was not getting out of Vermont without a little maple syrup experience. Maybe even more than a little.
Where to begin? New England Maple Museum? Sure, we went there. Local diner for those fluffy pancakes I talked about in the big paragraph above? Thanks, Henry's Diner in Burlington. But for the real scoop on maple syrup, we opted to pay a visit to a farm where this stuff is actually made and talk to someone who puts in the time all year long. That meant time in the sugar house, a walk in the woods and whatever else we could find on property.
A quick internet search, some website checking out, a few eliminations and we settled on Baird Farm about an hour and a half north of Bennington. We kept a couple of alternates on our agenda in case Baird didn't pan out. We didn't even think about stopping anywhere else once we finished our time there.
Let's start with the basics. Maple syrup comes from maple trees. Specifically the sap of those maples, which from about late February to mid-April (depending on the year and the climate) can be extracted from the maples while the temperatures swing between freezing and thawing. This freeze-thaw action builds up pressure within the trees which allows easy extraction by simply sticking a tap into the trunk of the tree and letting the sap flow out. Easy enough? Good!
Now, traditionally, the tap inserted into the tree was a metal apparatus with a spout on the non-tree end and a hook for a metal bucket. Stick the bucket on the hook, wait for it to fill with sap, go collect all your buckets, process the sap and voila!...maple syrup.
That process may work fine for a small at-home operation or maybe even a larger commercial farm some decades ago. But harvesting today likely looks like a series of taps in trees connected to tubes connected to larger tubes going into a sugar house to get the 1.5% to 2% sugar content sap up to the 66.9% sugar content syrup so you can enjoy your pancakes or waffles or French toast in the proper way. Not too complicated, right?
Those are the basics.
 |
| Today's tapping hardware. |
Baird Farm was established by the current Baird family 102 years ago. The extended family can actually claim that the farm has been in the fam longer than 102 years but the current ownership goes back four generations to 1918 when the ancestors of today's Bairds purchased the property from an aunt. The farm today consists of the 65 acre farm proper with a couple of forests adding about 170 acres to the total operation. The extra land holds the maples. All 12,000 of them in two separate but about equal 6,000 tree sections.
With 12,000 trees on the property contributing to the harvest, there are no buckets attached to trees at Baird Farm. Try about 80 miles of tubing of various sizes delivering all that slightly sweet sap down to two pump houses at the lower portion of the property where it's collected into a tank before being pumped back up to the sugar house. The sap flows by gravity but is also pulled by vacuum down to the pump house to speed up the whole operation.
Twenty some years ago, the sugar house was the first and last stop after the pump house, where the sap (which is mostly water) would be boiled down to the required thickness and sugar content under the watchful eye of an experienced syrup maker, who could often tell when the syrup was ready for bottling by watching the way it ran off a spoon. But about the turn of the last century, the Bairds picked up a reverse osmosis machine which fairly quickly extracts some of the water in the sap to increase the overall sugar content from 2% or less up to 18%. Saves a ton of time apparently.
The sugar house is the next and final stop, consisting of a couple of 7,000 to 8,000 gallon holding tanks which feed into the evaporator where the final reduction is made. Today the final product is checked not by eye and the rolling-off-the-spoon check but with a hygrometer to ensure a more consistent product. The evaporator today also comes with an on-off switch rather than being wood-fired, which is a whole lot more effective at halting the cooking off process when it's either at the right sugar level or when a group of tourists like us interrupts production asking for a tour and tasting.
For the record, we did not halt any kind of production. We're months away from that.
 |
| The stainless steel holding tanks. |
 |
| The evaporator, turning sap into syrup. |
So how much sap goes into making a gallon of syrup? About 45-55 gallons of sap per gallon of maple syrup is the answer. The annual yield from the farm is about 6,000 gallons, or about 1/2 gallon per tree. To get 6,000 gallons, you need to extract and boil down about 300,000 gallons of sap. That's a lot of boiling down in the evaporator, even after the reverse osmosis machine (which sounds like some science fiction movie invention every time I write that). And it all has to be supervised. Think you put in overtime at work? It's not uncommon to shut operations down in the hot sugarhouse at midnight or 1 a.m. Heck, there might even be the odd 4 a.m. night every so often.
And since we are on the subject of work...each one of those 12,000 trees are tapped by hand every year and the taps are pulled within 30 days of the end of extraction. It's cold in Vermont. That sometimes means deep snow and snowshoes to get that job done. Depending on the conditions, upwards of 300 to 400 taps can be placed in a single day. And not just anywhere. Once a tap is placed the tree is scarred in that spot and you'll need to pick a different spot so the trunk can recover.
 |
| Slice out of a maple tree showing the scars of past tappings. |
 |
| One of the two pump houses. |
How many people are employed at Baird Farm to do all this? Three. That's it. No joke. Three people do all the tapping, the boiling and the untapping. This is some hard work. And that's just in the production season if things go perfectly, which they don't always do.
Sometimes lines stop producing. Maybe a squirrel chewed through one of the tubes. Or if it's not a squirrel maybe a chipmunk. Or a deer. Or a porcupine!!! Tree falls in the woods? Yikes! How many lines does one of those things take down? Remember, there are 80 miles of tubes. 80 miles!! Now, the drop in pressure can be measured in the pump houses and gauges out on the lines themselves can get pretty close to where the loss in pressure is occurring but that's about as close as instrumentation can get you. The lines need to be walked. In the snow. Maybe with snowshoes. For miles.
If I've made it sound like this is some hard work for only about six weeks a year, I apologize. There's plenty of work in the off season to be done too. Tubing needs to be replaced as frequently as every three years. Not all of it. But enough of the 80 miles to add up to miles and miles of the stuff being changed out each summer.
And if you are thinking that maybe you can spread out the work by doing some of the tapping in the fall, when the freeze-thaw action is also going on, think again. Sure you could do it that way but there would be more issues with lines freezing and the trees can't produce but once a year so if you missed maximum production you'd lose product.
Who wants to be a maple syrup farmer? My hand is down. I'll just buy the stuff.
 |
| Shots of maple syrup, anyone? Yes, please! |
Speaking of buying, you can do that at Baird Farm. I'm not going to say that this was the best part of the tour because we got so much great information out of 90 minutes (not a typo) there but the buying certainly was the tastiest part of our visit. Well, until the mint infused maple syrup sampling that is.
Maple syrup is graded by color and taste into one of four categories: Golden Delicate, Amber Rich, Dark Robust and Very Dark Strong. The first word (or words in the case of Very Dark) describes the appearance of the syrup and the second (or third) word describes the flavor. They used to be Fancy, Grade A Medium Amber, Grade A Dark Amber and Grade B but everyone wanted the Fancy stuff and nobody wanted Grade B just out of principles of labeling rather than letting their tastebuds be the decider of what they wanted. The color is determined by the timing of the extraction. Sap later in the season is darker than earlier sap.
Our six samples (the photograph above was taken mid-sampling) each covered the four categories plus a shot each of spruce infused and mint infused syrup. The spruce infused was interesting and not entirely unappealing. I hate mint (except in dental products and gum) so that one went unfinished for me despite its already small size. The winners for us in the straight maple? Golden Delicate which was so smooth and light and the Dark Robust, which packed a flavor punch that had some seriousness to it. This is some seriously good stuff. I don't know that I will ever think about maple syrup quite the same way again and for damn sure I'm not ever buying any of the fake stuff ever again.
I'm amazed that we spent an hour and a half on the Baird Farm but there was not a boring nor an uninformative minute. Our guide for the mid-morning was Jenna, daughter of the current Baird Farm owners and partner in the retail business. Jenna is one of those three people tapping her share of 12,000 trees on snowshoes every winter and cooking sap into sugar to all hours of the night and morning and replacing tubing and all other sorts of jobs to keep the place running, including spending time with us one Thursday morning in August. This was probably the most action packed and straight up fun thing we did in our time in Vermont. It was worth every penny of the free tour price plus the money we dropped on swag, including a bottle each of Golden Delicate and Dark Robust.
 |
| The sugarhouse at Baird Farm, where it all happens. |
I mentioned earlier in this post that I had a backup plan in case our experience at Baird Farm wasn't everything I thought it could be. I wasn't joking; I had two additional maple syrup farms on my agenda that we could have visited in the event we were disappointed. There's no way that was going to happen. The first place we picked was the best I'm sure, even if I didn't get to the other two. Why mess with success?
From start to finish, we spent a bit under four days in Vermont but there was a little more maple-ing than just our visit to Baird Farm that we were able to pack into our time there. I ate maple chipotle beef tacos and a breakfast sandwich with maple bacon (OK, so that last one was at Dunkin'). I also brought back at least two kinds of beer brewed with maple syrup for post-trip enjoyment and of course, I did end up one morning with a stack of pancakes (to go) that I saturated with maple syrup. And I do mean saturated.
We also stopped by the New England Maple Museum, which is about a 10 minute drive west of Baird Farm. We shopped (including our one per trip Christmas tree ornament purchase), took advantage of an available restroom and hung out near the world's largest jug of maple syrup. I don't know if that claim is true but how could we not?
My hunch above about Vermont equaling maple syrup is statistically accurate by the way. While numbers out there seem to differ a little, it appears Vermont far and away produces more maple syrup (over 2 million gallons in a year) than any other state. Its output is about half of that in the entire United States and it easily bests the next five producers combined.
New York, Maine, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, if you must know. Vermont is best. At least in the maple syrup department.
 |
| Mmmmm...pancakes with maple syrup. From Henry's Diner on Bank Street in Burlington. |
 |
| Proof I was in Vermont. |
No comments:
Post a Comment