Authors: Douglas Whynott
The Sugar Season (8 page)
K
EVIN MADE HIS SECOND BOIL
of 2012 on February 10. It would have been his earliest boil ever, except for the one the week before on February 3. On February 10 Kevin made 451 gallons of syrup, bringing the total for 2012 to 617 gallons. On February 10 the temperatures at Bascom’s went from 25° in the morning to 41° in the afternoon. The tapping crew of four people worked all that day, finishing Putnam’s Lot, raising their total tap count to 33,700.
Two days later, on February 12, the temperature was 6° in the morning, getting up to only 12° in the afternoon, and the sap run halted for four days.
Nevertheless some meteorologists were describing this as “the non-winter of 2012.” Partly this was because of a lack of snow—there was a snow drought. Going into the last winter Kevin plowed the parking lot and Sugar House Road sixteen times by January 1. But this year he had plowed only four times going into February, and that included when he plowed after the big snowstorm in October. Meteorologists claimed that the cause of the drought and the warm weather
was due to an unusual positioning of the jet stream, which had looped far to the north in North America and, conversely, far to the south in Europe. Because the jet stream acts as a boundary for weather fronts, warm air spread northward in the United States and Canada while polar air moved southward through Europe. During those two days when a heat wave passed through New England on February 1 and 2, bringing temperatures in the 40s and 50s, temperatures in the Ukraine dropped to –28° Fahrenheit.
On Thursday, February 16, the temperatures ranged from 29° to 42°, starting a new sap run. Kevin Bascom boiled for the third time the next day on February 17, his third Friday in a row, and made 621 gallons. He boiled again on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, bringing the total production for 2012 to 2362 gallons. On Monday it turned cold again and the trees shut down for two days.
On Wednesday morning there was a half-inch of snow, followed by a warm afternoon in the midforties, and that triggered a sizeable run. Kevin boiled for seven hours the next day, making a whopping 1373 gallons, which only a few years ago would have been a record day. It only got up to 38° that day, which put a brake on the sap run. Kevin’s boil the next day, on Friday, February 24, produced a modest 283 gallons of syrup. His total production then stood at 4018 gallons.
Some sugarmakers called this period from February 16 to February 24 “the big run.” Some said they had missed it. But another much bigger run was about to come.
Because of the early start of the season, the tapping crew completed their work near the end of the big run. As of February 23 there were 63,865 taps feeding into the Bascom sugarhouse.
Y
OU COULD TELL
that Kevin was boiling when you arrived at the parking lot and saw the broad column of steam shooting through the sugarhouse roof. That steam was scented with maple, and as soon as I got out of the car and stood in the open air I encountered the sweet smell. I liked this idea of standing in a maple-scented mist at the top of a mountain.
Inside the sugarhouse Kevin was at the evaporator. Kevin is slight of build, quiet of voice, but he was running a high-powered, finely tuned machine, with its rows of steam pipes, pulsing hoses, fervid boiling and the fans throwing off sap steam, the water condensing and dripping, the syrup flowing out, and the reverse-osmosis machines in an adjacent room whirring at a high-tech pitch. I tried talking to Kevin at the evaporator, but there always was too much noise, and his voice was too soft to follow over the kaleidoscopic sound. But at intervals, twenty-five feet away in another room by the filter presses as he poured syrup from a hose into a fifty-five-gallon drum, you could hear Kevin talk. He was experiencing the pleasure of the harvest there.
I said to him once, “Some people work all year to get two hundred gallons. It’s like you’re flying the Concorde and they are in little Cessnas.”
“It’s like flying the Concorde with one person,” he said with a burry laugh.
B
OILING HAD COME
a long way over the last 400 years. Native Americans boiled sap in hollowed-out logs, into which they
placed hot rocks—they made great quantities of sugar this way. European settlers used iron kettles, a single kettle to which they added fresh sap to the thickening, blackening syrup. Sometimes they used two or three kettles heated over an open fire, with sugar solutions of different stages in each kettle. In the mid-1800s sugarmakers began to use flat pans, rectangular and as much as six feet long, boiling the sap over a stone or brick fireplace—an arch, this fireplace was called. Remnants of those stone or brick arches can be found in the woods today, sometimes even in places where maples no longer stand.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century modern evaporators were developed, with metal fireboxes, also called arches, with two pans on top. One pan was for rapid boiling, the other for finishing syrup. Eventually the boiling pan developed so as to be fluted with deep troughs so as to have more surface area to transmit heat. As the sap boiled and thickened, it was transferred from the flue pan to the syrup pan.
In the syrup pan the thickening syrup moved along by means of a density gradient, the peculiar principle in which thinner syrup pushed thicker syrup ahead. At the final stage, when the syrup was at a density of two-thirds sugar, it was then “taken off,” strained, and filtered.
The fuel for the fire was wood. Generally a sugarmaker could produce a few gallons of syrup per hour, depending on the size of the evaporator, the sugar content of the sap, the properties of the wood, and the skill and effort of the person feeding the fire.
A researcher at the University of Vermont devised a formula known as the “Rule of 86” to determine how many
gallons of sap needed to be boiled to make a gallon of maple syrup. The principle was mysterious and simple: if the sap was at one percent sugar content, it took 86 gallons to make a gallon of syrup. But by doubling the sugar content to two percent, the work on the other end was essentially halved, now taking 43 gallons of sap at two percent sugar content to make a gallon of syrup. I found it interesting to multiply the work out—a crop of 1000 gallons of syrup made from two percent sap (often the normal content) would require the boiling of 43,000 gallons of sap. The Bascom crop of about 24,000 gallons would necessitate the boiling of 1,032,000 gallons of sap. Though what they do is actually processing.
When Kevin Bascom came to work on the farm in 1979 Bascom’s had about 30,000 taps on tubing. Bruce had been developing the system for six years. Ken Bascom was well ahead of most sugarmakers because he was boiling by using steam in pipes under high pressure. By 1979 Ken had added to his sugarhouse two oil-fired evaporators that did the bulk of the boiling, feeding reduced sap to the steam-powered evaporator that then finished syrup quickly.
The cost of making syrup increased suddenly during the fuel crisis of 1973 and 1974, when the price of oil quadrupled. Ken had used oil because it was relatively inexpensive and reduced the labor of cutting wood. At that time Ken was burning about four gallons of oil to make a gallon of syrup. That cost was feasible when oil was 25 to 40 cents a gallon, but not at $1.60.
The fuel crisis intensified efforts to make the evaporation process more efficient. As it happened, around 1974 the first reverse-osmosis machines became available for maple syrup production. Reverse-osmosis machines are essentially
desalinization machines working, as their name implies, in a reverse way. Rather than save the fresh water and discard the salty brine as they do at sea, maple syrup producers discard the pure water—or permeate, as they call it—and use the sugar solution, the concentrate, for syrup.
The possibilities of reverse osmosis were irresistible to sugarmakers who were making a business of producing maple syrup. When a producer could concentrate maple sap at two percent sugar to eight percent by running it through an R.O., as they call them, he would have to boil only about ten gallons of water rather than forty-three. The syrup that cost the equivalent of four gallons of oil to produce would now only require one gallon of oil, with sap at eight percent sugar. The Bascoms added their first R.O. machine in 1977.
Ken Bascom boiled for more than forty years, and when he retired Kevin took over. Ken might boil on the weekends when visitors came by, but Kevin put in the long hours. “I used to boil sixteen hours a day,” he said. “I used to be here at nine o’clock every night. Eventually we had two shifts. I would boil in the morning and through the day and someone would replace me at night.” During the night shift Kevin was usually at the R.O., concentrating sap for the next day’s boil.
Some sugarmakers run sap through an R.O. and concentrate it to eight percent and take it no further, content to boil off ten gallons of water to make their syrup. Other sugarmakers, those like Kevin, take the sap to higher concentrations. They run the sap through the R.O. a second time and possibly bring it to twelve percent. Or, if they have reverse-osmosis machines with a higher number of membranes like Kevin has, they bring the concentrate up to eighteen or twenty percent on that second pass. At a concentration of
twenty percent, the sugarmaker only has to boil off three and a third gallons of water.
Using an evaporator with high-pressure steam like the one at Bascom’s, where the temperature in the steam pipes reaches 350°, and with highly concentrated sap, it takes only a pint of oil to make a gallon of syrup. The four gallons of oil that produced one gallon of syrup during Ken Bascom’s time can produce thirty-two gallons of syrup in the system Kevin runs.
Because of the power of high-pressure steam, Bascom’s is able to use an evaporator half the size they would need otherwise. Their processing has followed a path of reduction in step with their improvements. With sap at twelve percent, Kevin can fill a 55-gallon drum every half hour. With sap at twenty percent, he fills a drum every twenty minutes. That is 55 gallons of syrup produced in only twenty minutes. That is 2.75 gallons per minute—a gallon about every twenty-two seconds.
The membranes in an R.O., membranes that are fine enough for water to pass through but not as easy for sugar molecules, require a lot of care and attention. Kevin cleans his at least once a day, using the permeate separated from the sap.
Before raw sap ever reaches the membranes, it is filtered several times. From the storage tanks behind the sugarhouse the raw sap first passes through a filter of diatomaceous earth (fossilized remains of diatoms, often used in swimming pool filters) that removes large particles. The sap passes through a bag filter, then through a prefilter attached to the R.O. Using a pair of reverse-osmosis units on the first pass, Kevin processes 8000 gallons per hour, bringing it to a concentration of eight percent.
He then routes the sap outdoors to a storage tank where it cools. Kevin usually makes the final concentrate at night. The sap is filtered again, passing through a bag filter and then a cartridge filter before passing it through the membranes on the R.O. Kevin slows down the flow rate, and the sap emerges at eighteen to twenty percent.
In the morning he starts up the evaporator again, charging it with steam from the boilers in the basement. He moves the concentrate through a preheating unit, a box above the evaporator that the escaping steam from below heats—a “steam-away” this is called. The sap then enters the evaporator near the boiling point. Less than a minute later it’s maple syrup.
