Sweetness.

3-24-11 VERMONT: It’s been colder, and the snow has remained and stayed firm enough to comfortably walk around on, in snowshoes, of course. Val and Lucy are back in Brooklyn Heights, and Judy and I are figuring out how long to stay in snowland.

Judy, BTW, had a letter published in the NYT Science Section on Tuesday. Here’s the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/science/22letters3.html?_r=1&ref=science
I have written the NYT, perhaps a dozen times, and never gotten more than a ‘thanks for your interest’. Judy’s letter was, of course, edited to a shadow of its original self.

Across the road, they’re boilin’, turning sugar maple sap into syrup. It takes 100 gallons of sap, collected in the buckets hanging on the taps in the trees and then carried to the sugar house, to make 2.5 gallons of syrup. The sap, looking like water, is poured into the tank on the side of the sugar house from where it feeds by gravity into the maze of a large, compartmentalized, rectangular pan heated by a long, wood-fired stove called an ‘arch’. The sap moves through the sections of the pan, boiling as it goes, pushed along by the inflow of more sap. At the other end of the maze, the syrup is decanted when it has reached the right specific gravity and temperature. They boil at a rate of 25 gallons per hour. The process turns a lot of water into steam and a lot of wood into smoke, both of which are wafting out of the sugar house. Their excellent syrup is branded as ‘Winter Ridge’, but you probably won’t find it very far from Thetford, VT.


Lots of buckets and steam and smoke to make a little syrup. A sugar house has a huge cupola with sides that open to let the steam out and a chimney for the smoke.

The collecting tank is on the gable end of the sugar house.