‘Weather’ Or Not—

Maple Sugar Season Sweetens Newtown

By Nancy K. Crevier

Their methods of collection and boiling down may differ somewhat, but for local maple sugar farmers Kent Carpenter, Chris Locke, and Ken MacKenzie, the end result is the same: the amber elixir known as maple syrup.

This year the men all have had a common concern, though. The unusually warm winter threatened to put a stop to any kind of sap collecting this year, as sap flow is dependent upon freezing cold nights with warm, sunny days. The warm day part was working out, but until a recent cold snap, nights were just too balmy to ensure any kind of sap production.

“The cold January weather was a saving grace for those of us who maple sugar,” said Mr Carpenter. “Traditionally, Washington’s birthday is the day to tap, but this year, it looked like it would be somewhat later than that. It all has to do with the weather.”

Maple sugaring has been a part of Mr Carpenter and his wife, Sigrid’s, life for nearly 20 years, but his connection with the late winter crop goes back much further than that. “My father grew up on a working farm in northern Pennsylvania where they did maple sugaring as a cash crop,” said Mr Carpenter. His father, even though they tapped no trees themselves, continued the maple syrup tradition with his children. “We would travel to a maple farm to get syrup every spring. We always had maple syrup.”

[“My wife and I] started sugaring at a vacation home we had in Pennsylvania,” said Mr Carpenter, “where we had 100 trees that we tapped. I had a nephew there similarly smitten by the maple syrup bug and we worked together. I’m not really sure what precipitated our sugaring. I think it was just the availability of the trees,” he said.

When the Carpenters moved from Stamford to the vintage home on Flat Swamp Road in Newtown in 1997 that they have painstakingly restored, the 20 maple trees on the 1.4 acres of land seemed to cry out to partake in the practice of sugaring that had been the norm at the time the home was built.

They started out with the traditional method of collecting sap by hanging buckets from taps, but he has switched over to a tap on the tree with a short hose that feeds into a five-gallon bucket. It takes about two to three days, depending on the sap flow, to fill the bucket, and when Mr Carpenter has collected 75 gallons of the slightly sweet, watery liquid, his real work begins.

To concentrate the tasty sugars, the sap must be boiled off. A huge, stainless steel trough filled with sap is set above a raging, wood-fed fire that needs to be nourished every 15 minutes. “I can boil off about ten gallons an hour, so in one day, I can usually boil down the 75 gallons the pan holds,” said Mr Carpenter. Using scrap wood that he has collected from his yard, he stokes the fire and, in- between, holds court with neighbors walking past and enjoys a cup of coffee and the chance to be outdoors in the early spring sun.

When the sap has been reduced to a manageable quantity, Mr Carpenter finishes off the product in the kitchen, where he has better control over the fire. “At this point, it takes constant attention until the correct temperature is reached and it is thick enough,” explained Mr Carpenter. Like the true chemical engineer that he is, he then makes an actual measurement of the specific gravity, before pouring the syrup through a felt filter and into sterile jars.

Because it takes approximately 40 gallons of sap to come up with one gallon of syrup, he is happy to end up with about five gallons when the short season is over. It is enough, he said, to keep his friends and family supplied, and lucky is the host who invites the Carpenters to dinner: “Instead of a bottle of wine, we usually bring a fancy container of maple syrup when we are invited somewhere,” said Mr Carpenter.

There are a lot of aspects of sugaring that he likes. It is a connection to his past, and as a chemical engineer, he is fascinated with what is, after all, a chemical process. “The real driving force is that you get a marvelous product. It’s purely hobby,” said Mr Carpenter, “just a sense of self-satisfaction.”

Seven Trees On Riverside Road

For the past four years, Chris Locke has tapped seven trees on his Riverside Road property. Five of the trees are sugar maples, the preferred variety, and two, he said, are silver maples. Any variety of maple tree can be tapped, explained Mr Locke, but it is the sugar maple that will produce the best flow of sap, the best quantity of sap, and the sweetest end result.

Encouraged by a friend who does sugaring in North Canaan, Mr Locke decided the process looked like fun and gave it a try. “It’s not a whole lot of work,” he said, “and it’s nice to have something you made to give away. Really, the hardest work is carrying the jugs up the driveway.”

Maple sugaring fits into the ecologically sensitive lifestyle that Mr Locke, an electrical engineer, his wife, Donna, and their three children try to maintain. Along with raising chickens, heating his home with wood, canning fresh produce, and hunting, maple sugaring is a natural fit. “I like doing things that nobody does anymore,” said Mr Locke. “Nobody understands where our food comes from anymore. People don’t realize what their food is supposed to taste like. There is the chore aspect in these things we do, but I don’t mind that.”

Mr Locke’s maple sap collection process consists of three trees hooked into one line of plastic tubing that feeds into a five-gallon bucket, two more trees patched together feeding into another bucket, and one lone tree feeding into a bucket via tubing. The taps, or spiles, are fit into shallow holes drilled into the trunks of the trees each spring and hooked into the tubing system. “I figure to get about one gallon, per spile, per day, in a good year,” he said. It is hard to predict what this season will bring. “The season is starting a little late. It depends on if we get a warm spell and how long it lasts. It may be only a couple of weeks for me,” he said.

From the early run of sap, Mr Locke will boil down the liquid into a light amber-colored grade A syrup. Sap from later in the season will result in a darker, grade B syrup, as the concentration of water in the sap is higher then, and requires a longer boil down time.

“Once you start boiling down, you need to go by temperature,” explained Mr Locke. “I measure the boiling point of water the day that I am making syrup and boil the sap until it is 7.5 degrees above the boiling point that day.”

Even though he heats his home with wood, Mr Locke has found a propane unit, much like an outdoor turkey fryer, to give him the results he desires for the quantity of maple syrup he makes. Like Mr Carpenter, he finishes off the product in the more controlled environment of his kitchen, before pouring it into sterile jars where, he said, it will keep safely for more than a year.

“It’s that old-fashioned Yankee mentality, I guess, that I like about sugaring. I think I would have been happy being born 100 years ago. I like the idea of doing what we can ourselves,” he said.

In The Sugar House

There was no motivation behind his foray into maple sugaring in 1978, said Ken MacKenzie, outside of an interesting article he read. While he does offer eight-ounce bottles of his maple syrup for sale from his home at 71 Hanover Road, he is in complete agreement with Mr Locke and Mr Carpenter when he says that maple sugaring is not done for the money. “What I produce in one season of 40-hour weeks — about ten gallons — a commercial guy can do in an hour. I make about enough to pay for the bottles,” he chuckled.

The MacKenzie system is a bit more sophisticated than that utilized by Mr Carpenter and Mr Locke. “I started out boiling down sap on my gas grill in the back yard that first year,” said Mr MacKenzie. From there, the process has grown to encompass a sugar house built by himself and his two sons in 1981, a 65-gallon holding tank that feeds the sap via an insulated hose into a prewarmer, and then into the four-compartment evaporating pan set over the wood stove in the sugar house. The pan setup is very similar to that found in commercial operations, said Mr MacKenzie, and as yet another engineer dabbling in maple sugar farming, he designed it himself.

The sap is collected from 42 buckets that hang beneath tiny 5/16-inch spiles. The spiles, new to his operation this year, are smaller than those traditionally used, but create less stress for the trees, he said.

Once the sap starts to flow, Mr MacKenzie empties the buckets every day, pouring the clear sap through an upside-down poultry feeder fitted with a filter that acts as a funnel into the tank. The sap flows continuously into the evaporating pan in the sugar house, and when a substantial level is reached, he fires up the stove and sugaring begins.

The stove, like Mr Carpenter’s outside fire, needs constant attention, and by the time sugaring season is over, Mr MacKenzie figures he goes through close to a cord of wood, all cut from trees on his property.

At 219 degrees, the syrup is tapped out of the fourth bay of the evaporating pan, through a filter, and into big coffee urn, ready to be bottled. “I have found that if I warm up the syrup in the urn, it is easier to bottle it warm,” said Mr MacKenzie.

As much as he loves maple sugaring, in 1986 Mr MacKenzie took a 14-year hiatus from the process. “[My wife Karen and I] owned Bethel Cycle Shop at the time and I was working full-time at an engineering job at Eaton Corporation in Danbury. There was just too much to do, so I took a break,” he said.

In 1999, he retired from Eaton and sold the bike shop. He painted the sugar shack, cleaned out his equipment, updated his process, and returned the spring time chore to his “to do” list in 2002.

With the work, though, comes some fun and relaxation for Mr MacKenzie. The sugar shack is a comfortable little room, wired for electricity and plenty cozy once the wood stove is stoked. The inside doors of the building are covered with names and dates penned there by the many friends and family members who have passed through during sugar seasons. There are lights and a radio, and while he feeds the fire there is ample time to catch up on his reading, said Mr MacKenzie.

The sugar house is also the site of “Man Night” every year, as well. “We have fun. Believe it or not, we squeeze about six guys into this space and have a dinner. We cook up pork loins on the grill, smoked trout, a nice salad. It’s a lot of fun,” he said, and everyone there knows that “Man Night” means that a new crop of maple syrup is on the way from Mr MacKenzie’s acres.

For maple lovers and these three small maple farmers, there is nothing like real syrup for the pancakes, drizzled over ice cream or pound cake, tasty ham glazes and maple-sweetened barbeque sauce, and homemade maple granola, just a few of the many uses for the native sweetener.

Ken MacKenzie finally tapped his maple trees on February 20, just a couple of days after Mr Locke and Mr Carpenter did, when a break in the cold daytime temperatures signaled an opportune time to do so. “Once the trees warm up — it has been so exceptionally cold up to now — it should be a good year after all,” said Mr MacKenzie.

Mr Locke agreed that despite the erratic weather patterns during late February and the early part of March, that it should turn out to be a decent year. “It was a slow start when I first tapped, and then the ground and trees refroze and no sap was flowing,” he said. The weekend of March 10 proved bountiful for him, however, when he captured nine gallons of the precious fluid in just one day. “You just never know,” he said.

And if Mother Nature has decided to stop playing games, the maple sugar season that almost wasn’t, will be.