The Sugar Season (4 page)
Authors: Douglas Whynott
“The public out there still thinks we’re doing it in the mythic way with oxen and buckets,” Bruce said. “We can’t put a picture of tubing and vacuum on that jug of syrup.” It was true. Not many people knew about tubing and vacuum, reverse-osmosis machines, or steam-powered evaporators of the kind Bascom’s used. Or about the scale on which Bruce was operating.
Bruce mentioned a company that I will call Gold Coast, a hip grocery chain that makes a practice of not revealing the source of their supply, all of which has the Gold Coast label.
“The order came through,” he said.
I knew that the Gold Coast order was a big deal for Bascom’s. Bruce said the bottling crew was working on this Saturday, filling the initial order in preparation for shipment. He asked if I wanted to see the work.
We went to the bottom floor near the evaporator, where five men wearing hairnets and white coats were at their stations. Plastic jugs wobbled along conveyors and were
filled with hot and filtered syrup. Further down the line a machine spun plastic caps on the jugs. The jugs spun through a machine that attached labels, then the final march to cardboard boxes. One worker placed the jugs on the line, others monitored the filling and labeling, and another placed the jugs in boxes. We watched this hum that smelled of syrup and money. Bruce smiled and said, “They want to work today because they’re being paid overtime.” David Bascom, Bruce’s cousin and the operations manager, joined us. David was pleased with the progress of the work. This initial order was for six trailer truckloads of syrup, and it looked like they would have them on the road ahead of schedule.
The order was actually for a single quart of syrup that would sit among other quarts of maple syrup, all with Gold Coast labels, in stores nationwide. In order to completely stock that shelf in all the Gold Coast stores and to have enough replacement stock to last a couple of weeks, Bascom’s had to ship almost 70,000 quarts.
Bruce explained the numbers:
11,520 quarts per trailer load
69,520 quarts for the initial order of six trailer loads
5,760 quarts per week to resupply
Because of the other competition for attention on that rack of maple syrup in the Gold Coast stores, the label on the jug had to be appealing. This label was just that—gentle waves of color, browns and reds, a motif suggesting the forest but with an artful design, like something from the scissors of Matisse, sure to appeal to the hip Gold Coast shopper.
There was one very important word on that label that meant some heavy lifting for Bruce. One line of the label read “Vermont Maple Syrup,” the state synonymous with maple syrup in the minds of many. Vermont produced forty percent of the maple syrup crop in the United States. Bruce needed to find enough Vermont maple syrup to fill those tens of thousands of jugs. He had some on hand already, but he was working the phone lines to find more.
The Gold Coast order was the achievement of Arnold Coombs, Bruce’s sales manager, and it came through at just the right time. The order would help pay for the new building, and the new building was all about orders like the one from Gold Coast.
T
HE AMOUNT OF MAPLE SYRUP
produced at Bascom’s is less than three percent of what they sell, but it is still a substantial amount. They made 23,900 gallons in 2010, more than a fourth of the maple syrup crop for the state of New Hampshire.
Bruce’s cousin Kevin Bascom “ran the woods” and did all the boiling. Kevin hadn’t grown up at the farm in Acworth as Bruce had. Instead, he grew up in Nottingham, near the University of New Hampshire (UNH), where his father, Rodney Bascom, taught forestry and mechanics at the farm school. His family spent a few weeks every summer in Acworth, camping out near the farm that Rodney owned and where they cut about forty cords of firewood for the tenants there. Kevin came from a large family. His father and mother, Frances, bore nine children of their own and adopted a girl. In addition they took in forty-five foster children, mostly on a long-term basis. Their house was affectionately referred to as “the place of constantly slamming screen doors.” When Rodney died in 2010 more than 200 people attended his funeral, where his brother Reverend Eric Bascom spoke, and
Kevin’s son met children of Rodney and Frances that he didn’t even know existed.
After attending the farm school at UNH, Kevin moved to Acworth in 1979 and began working for Bruce’s father, Ken Bascom. David Bascom, Kevin’s older brother, moved there a few years later after running a logging business. For a time Kevin, David, and Bruce were the primary workforce on the farm. They worked in the fields and cut wood. Kevin helped Ken improve the evaporation system and integrate reverse-osmosis machines. As the business grew, David moved indoors to manage operations, but Kevin continued to work in the farming operation and run the woods.
Over the years Kevin and, lately, his son Greg had been expanding and improving the tubing systems as well as the vacuum technology that went along with them. Periodically they replaced old tubing with new and rearranged the configurations for a better flow. Kevin set up the tubing systems according to the feel of the land, following the sags to take advantage of gravity.
Now in 2012 Bascom’s managed sixteen sugaring lots. Bascom’s owned the majority, and some were leased. Bruce paid 75 cents a tap for the leased lots, and for a landowner, over the course of, say, 4000 taps, this could add up enough to accept the sight of tubing lines in the woods. Bascom’s also bought sap from some producers; Bruce’s friends Peter and Deb Rhoades were one of that group. The lots covered about 800 acres and comprised a vast patchwork spreading out from Mount Kingsbury, with a few satellite lots. In all, factoring in those who sold sap to Bascom’s, there were 68,573 taps feeding into the sugarhouse in 2012.
As for the total length of tubing on those 800 acres, Kevin calculated by multiplying the average length of tubing per tap, 30 feet including the mainlines, by the total tap count. This put the total tubing length at 1,755,450 feet. That amounted to 332 miles, equivalent to the distance from Acworth to Philadelphia.
When I mentioned that figure to Gwen Hinman she said, “And we have to walk that three or four times a year.” It was all the more mind-boggling and weirdly impressive when you considered that all of that tubing, those 1.75 million feet, were designed to be airtight and under a vacuum pressure far lower than that of the air outside.
Regarding the strength of the vacuum pressure, Kevin told me about steel tanks that had been left empty for too long and collapsed like beer cans. Timothy Prescott, director of the Proctor Maple Research Center at the University of Vermont and an expert on vacuum, told me that contemporary vacuum systems could pull water out of the ground through the trees’ roots, like a sucking straw. He also qualified that statement by adding that vacuum pressure did not harm the tree. Another scientist and former director of the Proctor Center, Mel Tyree, a specialist in sap hydraulics, agreed. He told me that a tree generates negative pressures of its own far greater than those that vacuum pumps apply. He told me that the tree’s ability to transport liquids under negative pressures is a wonder of nature.
O
N
J
ANUARY
26, when the temperature ranged from 25° in the morning and got up to 45° in the afternoon, Kevin noted
on his production chart that the sap “ran a little.” For Kevin, “ran a little” was a relative term. In 2010 they dumped 500 gallons on the ground after a little run in February. Kevin liked to have at least 17,000 gallons on hand before he fired up his evaporator. That would yield about 300 to 400 gallons of syrup, depending on the sugar content of the sap.
Kevin didn’t want the tapping crew to begin too soon because he didn’t want the tap holes to dry out, for the wood to seal in the drilled holes. But his son Greg, who left a construction job each sugar season to come to work at Bascom’s for his father, said they needed to begin because they had a short crew and would never finish otherwise. They started on January 23 and three days later finished the Pond Lot, putting in 6,022 taps. On January 30 they finished Hall’s Lot, raising the count to 11,425.
The trees didn’t freeze on the night of February 1, after the temperature got up to 48° in the afternoon. When Kevin checked the temperature early the next morning it was at 33°. The crew finished tapping Ken’s Lot that day, putting the count at 13,907. They moved to Glenn’s Lot, a section on the south side of Mount Kingsbury, and finished tapping there by February 3, bringing the total tap count to 17,105. They were one-fourth done.
Kevin didn’t think there was a need to hurry because he was more than two weeks ahead of the earliest date he had ever boiled. But during those two days, on February 1 and 2, when warm air flowed up from the south, the trees awakened, and there was a major sap flow from Connecticut well into Quebec. At Bascom’s they gathered 10,000 gallons of sap.
And so Kevin made his first boil of 2012 on February 3. From those 10,000 gallons, which had an average sugar
content of 1.7 percent, he made 166 gallons of syrup. Many other sugarmakers over the region also boiled on February 3.
For many sugarmakers, using a wood-fired evaporator and not in possession of reverse-osmosis machines that concentrated sap, 166 gallons would have been a good year. They would have boiled those 10,000 gallons over many winter days and nights. But 166 gallons at Bascom’s was, to use a familiar term, a drop in the bucket.
I could hear Bruce’s words, saying that 166 gallons, at a wholesale price of $35 a gallon, were worth a total of $5,810, which was not so bad for a day’s effort at the evaporator. Though, actually, the production on February 3 was not a full day’s effort. Kevin would have produced those 166 gallons in less than one hour.
P
ETER RHOADES
, a forester and Bruce’s closest friend, who had gathered sap with him as a boy, been his college roommate, and put together timber plans for him over the years, said that Bruce built the new building “so he could compete.” Peter knew about all the past constructions and additions at Bascom’s, how Bruce had added on to the sugarhouse six or seven times and then had torn everything down and started over. Peter said, “It hasn’t worked out well for Bruce to go slowly and wait. It’s been best for him to go straight at it and all out.”
Of course Bruce had already been competing. Bruce operated in what was deemed the “second tier” of maple companies, composed primarily of single-owner proprietor businesses. Bruce’s primary competitor in the second tier was David Marvin of Butternut Mountain Farms in Morrisville, Vermont. They ran neck and neck, or hand in hand, depending on the situation. Others in the second tier were McClure’s Maple (which was bought by Dutch Gold when David McClure retired), Anderson’s in Cumberland, Wisconsin, and
Highland Sugarworks in Barre, Vermont. There were also a few Canadian companies in the second tier, such as Bolduc’s Maple, Bernard & Sons, and others in the maple-rich region of Beauce County, Quebec.