Tap, Tap, Tap On The Boulevard––

Give It Up For Syrup

By Dottie Evans

Hold it up to the light, and notice the clear, deep amber color.

Taste it, and savor the sweet, slightly smoky bouquet.

Pour it, and check out the viscosity: smooth, not too sticky, and yes, a little syrupy.

What is it? Not a fine Bordeaux wine but its triumphant New England counterpart –– Connecticut maple syrup tapped from local trees, backyard boiled and home bottled.

Now all that is needed is a hunk of unsalted butter slapped on a stack of buttermilk pancakes that have been dressed with crisp bacon or sausage. Anticipating such delights, many Newtown residents have made a practice of tapping their own mature sugar maple trees and making syrup to share with family and friends.

Doug Nelson of 14 The Boulevard is in many ways typical of those who look forward every year to carrying on this proud Yankee tradition. He manages it as many do, with a little help from his neighbors.

Mr Nelson taps three trees on his own property, three trees in Bob Klein’s yard across the street on Budd Drive, and one tree along The Boulevard owned by his next door neighbor, Jack Quinlan.

“I’ve been tapping my trees and my neighbors’ trees for about ten years now,” Mr Nelson said recently.

“I do it because it’s fun and because every year is a different experience. I like to ask my neighbors out of courtesy every year, though they always say yes.”

Mrs Klein on Budd Drive has told him not to bother, “just come on over.”

After all these years, she said, “he doesn’t have to ask.”

By the first of March, Mr Nelson had been tapping those seven trees for about three weeks but he said he got a late start this year because it was too cold, day and night.

“You’ve got to have the temperature going up to above freezing during the day, then going down again every night to have the sap run well,” he said.

His wife, Marilee Nelson, agrees it might not be a vintage year for maple syrup.

“It was too cold and then too warm,” she commented, adding that every day when this temperature fluctuation does not happen is another day when sap doesn’t run and your buckets don’t get filled.

“You can’t make it up, it’s just a lost day,” she added.

The 2003 tapping was a very good year according to Mr Nelson.

“I boiled about 120 gallons and got three quarts of syrup.”

One problem with a spate of warm weather after cold is the issue of holding the sap in large containers until it can be boiled and put up in jars. Maple syrup has a very high sugar content and it can go bad quickly if it gets too warm.

“You can smell the alcohol if it’s turned even slightly,” Mr Nelson said, adding, “I pack it in snow until I’m ready to start boiling.”

Sugar maple trees need to be at least 40 years old or 12 inches in diameter for one tap, 18 inches for two, and at least 24 inches for three or more. The tap is a small needle called a spile that penetrates the bark, to which a hose is attached leading to a bucket or pail.

This year, he is experimenting with a smaller hole drilled at 5/16  of an inch instead of the usual 7/16 .

“We’ll see if I get as much syrup with the smaller size.”

After boiling the sap over an open fire to evaporate the water, he strains it, and pours the syrup into 16-ounce Snapple jars. Then he puts them in the canner under boiling water at 214 degrees until a vacuum forms and the lids are sealed.

The sealed jars may be kept on the shelf indefinitely, but pure homemade maple syrup does not sit around the Nelson house very long.

“There are some fine old maple trees all along The Boulevard,” Mr Nelson said of his street off Church Hill Road, one of Newtown’s older roads once bordered by farmhouses, barns, and cornfields.

The stone wall that lines the eastern side of the street is an ancient one, and many of the biggest maples trees grow alongside it.

“They were probably all planted around the same time because they are pretty much in a straight line,” Mr Nelson figured.

“Across the street, you can see where they planted those two maples on either side of the front door of that old home. Now they are huge,” he added.

Those would have been the “bride and groom trees” that the early settlers and later the farm families frequently planted when a new house was put up. No telling how long these Boulevard trees have been tapped and by how many different Newtown families, but as long as they are healthy, Doug Nelson will be out there with his plastic buckets and long hoses, watching the thermometer and waiting for the sap to run.