Tonight an opossum crossed the road from an abandoned house that may have kept it safe and dry through the winter.

Warm rainy night but not warm enough for major amphibian travel – just four wood frogs got helped across the road.

Dispatch from the Sugarwoods, 2021, Part 5

The trees opened up yesterday and the sap ran as fast as I’ve ever seen it run. By the end of the day I’d collected 9 loads worth, or almost 7,500 gallons. Sap is crystal clear and the syrup has an exquisite flavor.

Dispatch from the Sugarwoods, 2021, Part 4

We made our first syrup of the year on March 10. Dad used a wheeled walker to get out into the sugarhouse, though he suffered from a lack of mud tires. We still use wood to fuel our evaporator, and fire loading is out of the question for him with his injury. He tended the reverse osmosis machine and filter press, though. And canned the syrup once we had a system set up right. 

After two months of deep cold and snow, we endured a three-day stretch of 60-degree-plus warmth that only a sugarmaker could complain about. One day touched 70 degrees here in southern Vermont. Sap runs are a Goldilocks-type proposition: we don’t want things too cold or too hot. If forced to choose one, we’d choose too cold, since that just puts things on pause. When it gets above 50 degrees, the sap starts to degrade, so it’s a race to get things processed. This degradation also creates a slime on the inside of a taphole which eventually stops the sap from flowing out of the tree. This is a weeks-long process, but the wheels get set in motion by high temperatures, and every high temperature accelerates the process. 

In light of this, the deep snow that we fought all spring getting tapped became an ally. The deep snowpack around the bulk tanks served as refrigeration – on the third day of the heatwave, the sap was still 39 degrees when we fed it into the RO. The color of the syrup we made with it suffered as it warmed in the bulk tank before boiling, but the flavor had the sweet, buttery, delicate profile you’d expect from first run sap.

Dispatch from the Sugarwoods, 2021, Part 3

One marker of a healthy rural economy is the existence of markets for secondary or minor products. If you’re a hardwood sawmill, your business, in theory, is producing furniture-grade boards. But at times the difference between red and black will be markets, or a lack thereof, for mat timbers (disposable beams used in the construction industry to stabilize the ground beneath heavy equipment), or pallets, or even the sawdust you produce. 

All Ag is like this, including sugaring. In theory, I’m in the business of crafting the maple syrup that sells directly to the consumer on our website or through the stores that carry our product – “table syrup,” in the industry. But I also need markets for the off-flavored “commercial grade” stuff that’s produced at the end of each season when the weather turns. On a year like this, because I’m a one-man show, a market for raw sap is playing a crucial role. I’ll be selling the sap for pennies a gallon instead of the dollars per gallon that any syrup I made from it would bring, but I’m also being paid in time that I can then use to both get woods work done and make what syrup I can.

I’m selling the sap to XR Maple, in the town of Arlington which is just north of here. It’s a family operation, where the father and son run around 9,000 taps and the father’s brother runs an adjacent retail store where they sell a good chunk of their crop. They’re all in on maple, with plans of expanding to 20,000 taps, so they have plenty of RO capacity and the storage to buy a large chunk of my crop and process it. It’s a cool example of two businesses helping each other out, which is the rule in so much of the ag world. It can be lean out there, so there’s strength in numbers. 

I was able to sell 4,700 gallons of sap last week while I finished tapping in the warmth, but then a ferocious cold arrived on 60-mile-per-hour winds that ended the first run. While there was some damage to the sap lines from falling limbs, I got most of it cleared up. The snow glazed over, and the hillsides glared sharply. If you dropped a tool on a hillside, you could count on it sliding 50, 60, 70 feet before it came to rest. 

I came across a coyote bed in the upper reaches of the Hall bush, and saw evidence where it had ripped a maybe 4-foot section of sapline off and then chewed it to bits. One of the intact bits still read “food grade,” which I imagined the coyote reading and misinterpreting. Bad jokes aside, it’s that time of winter where you start to worry about wildlife, and in a dark moment I could imagine the coyote starving and desperate for food. But I don’t think that’s what was happening here. I think it was more play – the tubing a chew toy not unlike what you’d buy in the store for the family dog.

At Work With Vermont Evaporator

When we see the Made in Vermont stamp on an agricultural product, we view it as a badge of quality. We probably know the town where it’s made, and might even know the people who made it. We can assume that it’s produced in relatively small quantities, and can imagine the care that went into its production – something we rarely expect in mass-produced products. The same is true with durable goods, and that’s part of what makes Vermont Evaporator such a cool story. This Made in Vermont item is itself much like the syrup it produces: hand-crafted with pride in small batches.

We caught up with Vermont Evaporator founder Kate Whelley McCabe to find out what goes into making each of company’s flagship Sapling evaporators. She provided this series of photos and walked us through the production process at Vermont Evaporator’s Montpelier headquarters.

“We special-order new, unpainted and unlined, 55-gallon steel barrels,” Kate explained. Most barrels sold are treated inside and out to protect the metal or the contents being stored. “But we’re not using the barrels to store something; we’re using the barrels to do something,” she noted. She added that most barrels are standardized by volume size rather than height and width; but in order to standardize the manufacturing process (the jigs used, the boxes for shipping, etc.), Vermont Evaporator has to be very careful to be sure they are getting barrels with exactly the same dimensions every time. (Also in the photo: Oliver, the shop dog, guards the door.)

The new barrels are placed in a jig and cut using a plasma cutter; the heat from the process lights up the inside a bright red as the employee makes the cuts. “Behind him is a giant fan that removes the fumes,” said Kate. “And we’re sure that all of our employees wear all of the necessary protective equipment.”

In this photo, the front door of the evaporator has been cut out, and the top opening where the pan will sit is being cut. An opening on the back for the smokestack will also be added.

Here, in an artistic shot that Kate said could be called “Portrait of a Barrel,” all of the cuts have been made. A frame to hold the pans has been attached along the sides of the top opening. And now it’s time for the “media blasting” – this essentially sands the barrel to prepare the surface before a coating is applied. “Instead of sand blasting, we use aluminum oxide,” said Kate. The employee dons fully protective PPE, including a helmet/mask with clean air supply hose before entering the blasting room to begin the process.

Vermont Evaporator achieves a durable protective coating for its evaporators without using a typical paint. “The wet part of paint is a solvent, and that’s actually the toxic part,” Kate explained. Instead, the company uses a dry particulate [often called a powder coating], which is blown onto the barrel. Here, the soon-to-be evaporator is being removed from the high-temperature oven that “cures” the powder coating.

At this point, the pieces all come together. This evaporator, which is sitting up on its back end for assembly, has been outfitted with a door frame and door, as well as the company’s emblem. A vent will be added (the holes for it are already cut).

One part of the evaporator that’s not manufactured in Vermont is the stainless steel pan in which sap will be made into syrup. “We sourced everything in Vermont at first, but the company that made the pans unfortunately went out of business,” said Kate. “But we kept in New England – the pans are currently coming from the Springfield, Mass., area.” Vermont Evaporator looked into producing its own pans, but the materials involved require highly specialized equipment and expertise. “Our pans are food-grade stainless steel with lead-free welds. Stainless is a whole different beast; we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment and highly specialized skills.”

Almost ready: These saplings are boxed and ready to go, with hand-written notes indicating the final pieces needed before shipping. Since Covid, customer pick-ups have been impossible, so all Vermont Evaporators are now shipped; this critical part of the process is expensive and requires careful packing and a lot of attention to detail, said Kate. It’s also another area where the special nature of doing business in Vermont pays off. “UPS is really good at their job. And I’ve built up a good rapport with our driver over the years,” she joked. “I’m talking making him Christmas cookies! We’ve worked out a system where he knows when we have boxes that really need to get out. Personal relationships really help.”