The Sugar Season

by Douglas Whynott

  “I couldn’t see going back to buckets,” Peter said, laughing.

  Anton explained the evaporation process to his friends, and Peter told them about sugar content and the Rule of 86. Peter said he boiled an average of fifty-seven gallons of sap to get a gallon of syrup. Anton explained the reverse-osmosis process, how it was possible to filter out eighty percent of the water so that a sugarmaker only had to boil four gallons. Which was something Peter didn’t do here. As a result his was a slower process. Anton teased Peter about the syrup not being ready for his friends.

  Good things come from waiting. They left as I had the night before, a half hour before the syrup was ready. Peter poured a few gallons into a steel bucket. He asked Petey to watch the float level while he tended to the syrup. The float level showed the amount of syrup in the flue pan, and Petey kept an eye on it, at one point opening the valve to let a little more sap flow in.

  Peter brought the syrup to the bench near the window and poured it through the layers of felt cloth. He then poured it into plastic jugs. A one-gallon container, a half-gallon container, seven quarts, a pint—almost four gallons altogether. He set the jugs on their sides to cool.

  Peter poured some of the syrup into tea cups and set one on a shelf by me. “Try some when it’s cooled a bit,” he said.

  He poured some into the grading set and compared. An A-medium, he said. Peter labeled the jugs, putting the date on them and the grade. He then stoked the fire, and the boil roared up again.

  Peter asked me if I ever heard of a man named Hemon Chase. He was a surveyor and wrote a couple of books about his life. “He was the person in the oldest generation I admired most,” Peter said. “He and Ben Porter. Ben Porter was a surveyor too.” And a sugarmaker, I heard, someone who also refused to use tubing, declaring he would never suck sap out of his trees.

  Peter admired their honesty. “I don’t know if it was their character that made them surveyors or whether it was surveying that made them who they were. Maybe it was being out in the woods all day. I suppose that today surveyors don’t even have to go into the woods.”

  “Thoreau was a surveyor,” I said. “Henry David Thoreau, who wrote Walden.”

  “Hemon used to drink a shot glass of maple syrup every day. I used to bring him a quart now and then.”

  I had been and would go into the woods with Peter on occasion, and I had wondered how his life in the woods influenced his development. Peter was known as an ethical forester. (“I hope so,” he said, when I brought it up one time.) Mostly I liked hearing his perspective as I watched him work and listened to him talk about trees. I watched him make choices as to which trees to cut and which to leave in a town forest in nearby Walpole—he was making decisions that would bear out long after his lifetime, such as when he selected an oak tree that would bear acorns, that would produce other oaks, that would also bear acorns, that would feed wildlife that would find that particular spot a favorable place to be 150 years from now. It seemed to me that the mentality of ethical forest management was similar to the mentality needed to reduce the human effect—the mentality for effective forest management could be a guide for reducing climate change. The long view, 150 years from now.

  Peter stoked the fire and it roared again, another stream of sparks soaring up the stack. I picked up the teacup and sipped. My words: “Oh my, this is amazing. Never have I tasted anything like this.”

  How to describe it? I couldn’t stop sipping, light sips.

  “I hope I don’t get sick drinking so much of this,” I said.

  “You won’t,” Peter answered.

  Just then Aunt Margaret came to get Petey, as it was getting dark. Peter’s Aunt Margaret was a teacher in Baltimore before she moved back to Acworth to take care of her parents, and she lived in the old farmhouse atop the hill above the sugarhouse. Peter handed her a teacup.

  I said something that included the word amazing about the taste.

  “The best,” she said.

  Petey took his dragon off the stairs and walked out, but Peter called him back. “Here, take a quart of syrup for Aunt Margaret,” he said.

  I soon left with a gallon of my own, enough to last a few months. I stopped to look at the sugarhouse again, the steam still rising, clouding actually, as it rolled down the roof. I saw sparks shoot up through the chimney. So elemental, all of it. I walked along the brook, passing through a pocket of cool air, carrying the jug that was so hot I had to keep switching hands.

  When I got home I told Kathy she should taste some while it was still warm. She made some toast. I opened the jug, and she bent down to it.

  “It has the scent of the sugarhouse,” she said.

  I bent to take a whiff of the vapors. “You’re right. It’s not just the maple scent, but the sugarhouse itself.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “It has the scent of the wood, the woodpile, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  That was it, the magic of this. Under the right conditions the sweetness of the sap, the taste of the tree, and also the character of the place where it was made. It seemed so, on this particular day.

  10

  THE SUGAR MACHINE

  BRUCE LEFT A PHONE MESSAGE and then sent an e-mail, asking whether I had seen the new sugar machine. This was a surprise to me because the sugar-making operation had always been off-limits. “Top secret,” Bruce said back in 2010. He even said this to the woman in Brattleboro who sold the granulated and powdered maple sugar; Cindy Finck was her name. You couldn’t help wonder what was going on in the sugar plant. Sometimes they ran three shifts, making sugar day and night in that room with the closed doors beyond the Cooler.

  Occasionally I talked with the man who was making the sugar, Joe James. This always happened when I was in the Cooler by the scales, when Joe came out of the room, dusted in powdery white. To me Joe had the look of an Iroquois warrior—tall, fierce, and sensitive, with a shaved head and a goatee. He was a chef by trade, one who now made sugar. Joe was quick to say that he was not a sugarmaker. “I make sugar,” he would say. And lots of it. Day by day Joe was probably making more maple sugar than anyone else in the world. Leading up to the changeover to the new machine, Joe was putting in serious hours building up a surplus of granulated and powdered maple sugar, just in case there was some sort of malfunction.

  Ken Bascom would have liked Joe James, maybe, for the eighty-hour weeks he put in. Doing the work of two or three men, Joe got ahead of the orders and had accumulated 500 barrels of sugar. The barrels were stacked two high and spread wide in a corner of the Cooler. As the stacks accumulated, Joe increasingly spent more time there. Once he said to me of the surplus, “I guard it like it’s my kid. Why? Because I made it.”

  Those 500 barrels represented a significant investment. It took fifty gallons of syrup to make a barrel of sugar, which weighed about 350 pounds. Therefore, Joe James’s 500 barrels represented 25,000 gallons of maple syrup, about one-fourth of the average New Hampshire crop, about $750,000 worth of syrup wholesale and $1,375,000 retail. But the sugar was worth much more than that. I paid $14 for a one-pound bag. Multiplied out by that figure, the retail value of Joe’s surplus would be about $2.45 million.

  Though expensive, granulated maple sugar was a fun product to use. I did a little experimenting with my pound and sprinkled some on French toast (very nice), made bread pudding (perfect for that), spooned some on oatmeal (no better way to add maple flavor), and stirred it into coffee. I heard that chocolatiers were becoming interested because of the smooth consistency maple sugar brought to a chocolate sauce, and I tried that—possibly the best use of all.

  The biggest customer for Bascom’s sugar was a Japanese man named Takashi Oshio. He had attended the University of Vermont, discovered maple syrup, and formed a company to export it to Japan. Though Oshio was promoting syrup, the majority of his sales were in maple sugar. He sold it to bakeries and other food manufacturers. Bruce told me that Oshio’s most enthusiastic customers were Japanese
girls, who ate the sugar like candy out of small plastic bags. Bascom’s shipped a truckload a month to Japan, sometimes two. A truckload consisted of about 147 barrels—about twenty-five tons of sugar.

  I met Takashi Oshio for an entertaining couple of hours during one of his periodic visits. He brought gift bags with samples of products in development—instant maple cappuccino, maple cookies, maple cereal. He held a tasting session and asked for comments. Most tended to be “Very good.” The main event, mostly tongue-in-cheek on Mr. Oshio’s part, was his performance of “Home on the Range” on a musical saw, an actual handsaw played with a violin bow. Bruce and David took the performance seriously, however. They printed up lyrics and assembled in the lunchroom all the workers they could gather. The woods crew was there, in boots and jackets. The bottling crew in white shirts and hairnets. Bruce, David, Sam Bascom (David’s son, who worked in the equipment store). A couple of the women from upstairs in the offices. Before Mr. Oshio began, Bruce and David presented him with another handsaw, not musical but painted, with scenes from Bascom’s. Mr. Oshio made a couple of false starts but then to that weird metallic vibrato everyone sang, “Give me a home, where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play . . .” Even Bruce sang, or seemed to. There was a round of applause and then a friend of Bruce’s, a sugarmaker and metal fabricator named Gardner Stetson, who was also a church organist, bowed his way through a tune. Judging by the expressions on both Mr. Oshio’s and Mr. Stetson’s faces, fleeting moments of pain—the saw was a fun but unruly instrument to play.

  All these weeks and months Joe James had been working on and had adapted to the old machine that Bruce had bought at auction after a maple company folded. Joe made a barrel of sugar—one barrel at a time with each batch—like he might make a bouillabaisse. As the syrup was cooking and approaching the crystallization stage, he sniffed the air—a smell like cider was good. Joe also felt the air upon his skin. If it felt too sharp and acidic, it might be time to adjust. Depending on what he sensed, Joe might dump another barrel into the mixing tank, and this is where it got tricky; this is where Joe’s skills as a man who made sugar came into play.

  The leaves on a maple tree produce carbohydrates through the process of photosynthesis. When the trees thaw in late winter or early spring they convert those carbohydrates into sucrose. When sugarmakers extract the sap from the trees, that first run contains nearly pure sucrose. People who make maple candy prefer syrup made on the second run, after the tubing lines have cleaned out during the first run.

  From then on, as bacteria and yeasts grow and act upon the sap, some of that sucrose is converted into other sugars, such as glucose and fructose. In technical terms the twelve-carbon-atom sugar of sucrose is converted into the six-carbon atom of glucose and fructose—essentially the microorganisms split the molecules. The sugars are inverted, as they say. As the temperature warms and the season progresses, the amounts of inverted sugar in the sap and syrup increase.

  Some inverted sugar is essential for making granulated sugar and other maple confections, but generally a low invert level is preferred. The higher the level of inverted sugar, the more difficult it becomes for the larger sucrose molecules to bond and crystallize. When people like Joe James are making sugar, they test the syrup and select barrels with a range of invert levels. Those barrels, in a sense, become Joe’s pantry. When he is making syrup—smelling the air or looking at the color of the sugar in his batches—Joe adds barrels with different invert levels according to his judgment—a two or seven percent or even twelve percent invert (about as high as he could go with the old machine). If the sugar was coming out too light, Joe might add a high-invert syrup to his mixing tank to darken the batch.

  The limitation of making maple sugar was that the invert level had to be relatively low, and this limited the kind of syrup a sugarmaker could use, sometimes severely. Joe, through practice and with Bruce’s help, was able to push the boundaries and use higher inverts—use the darker, more late-in-the-season kinds of syrup. Though sometimes, for some strange reason, light syrup could be high invert and dark syrup could be low—one never could truly tell going strictly by color. If the choice of the syrup going into the mixing tank was wrong, the sugar could go awry too. Joe once walked out of the sugar room with a batch of softballs to show the guys what he had made. The process could strain the machine while the sugar crystallized inside; Joe often watched the electric meter surge when crystallization was occurring. There had been times when Joe crawled inside the machine with a hammer and chisel to break up some solidified mass of sugar. Freak batches aside, Joe kept producing—thirty-five batches a week sometimes—working seven days a week, accumulating his stacks of surplus, his sugar babies.

  In March 2012, however, Joe was told to slow down, that he was getting too far ahead. He went back to working a forty-hour week, which seemed like nothing. But Joe lay awake at night thinking about his diminishing stockpile. When it got down to 150,000 pounds in those barrels, he thought, there would be only seventy-five tons left. An order from Oshio could wipe out a third of that.

  Bruce was well aware of the whole process and the limitations of invert levels in syrup. His goal in developing the new machine and in making sugar in general was to further push the boundaries of the types of syrup he could use. Bruce wanted to be able to use syrup with any invert level, to use B grade, C grade, or even Commercial syrup with invert levels that got up to twenty percent. It was also possible even to use buddy syrup, that late-season syrup with a taste of the leaf, because when all the water was burned off the leafy taste departed too. As one maple syrup producer told me, Bruce had pioneered the use of darker syrups for making granulated maple sugar. The new machine would be the only one of its kind in North America. The only one in the world, Joe James said, and this was probably true, as North America was the only place maple sugar was made at this level.

  For Joe James the new machine meant another change. In March 2012, when Bruce and I stood in the parking lot with Peter Gregg, the editor of Maple News, who happened to have stopped by for the day, Bruce pointed to the building where the sugar machine was housed and said, “That’s top secret.” Then he broke the secret and told Gregg that with the new machine they would be able to make granulated sugar from any kind of syrup, that it would be only a matter of turning dials. Like John Henry driving steel, Joe would no longer need to smell the air or feel the acidity on his skin. He would be using a touch screen, becoming less of a chef and more of an operator, a button pusher.

  I THINK BRUCE wanted to show me the new sugar machine simply because he was proud of it, because after several years of development here it was, designed in the United States, engineered in Germany, shipped to Acworth, and almost ready to begin production in such a way to capture the market. Secrecy would always be part of the program, but for now Bruce was opening up the doors and letting a few people see what he’d done.

  “Tell me if this is interesting,” he said when we walked over to look at it. “I think it’s interesting, but I want to know what you think.”

  A few words about the geography here. The Cooler, what was once called Bruce’s Playroom, had expanded in two directions. Most of the expansion was to the east, toward Ken’s Lot. The Middle Cooler was attached to the original Cooler, and above it was the warehouse for used and new equipment. On the east end of the Middle Cooler was grafted the new building, with the New Cooler, above which was the warehouse and bottling plant.

  To the opposite side of the Cooler, to the westward, was the sugar room. A new building had been grafted on to that, not so large, approximately thirty feet by thirty feet. This new addition was defined by its verticality. It had a deep basement and two floors. When it arrived the sugar machine was dropped down into this structure with a crane.

  Bruce and I rounded the corner of this new building and surprised two construction workers who were throwing snowballs made of the fresh snow. “Working hard or hardly working?” Bruce asked as we passed by.

>   We climbed the stairs and entered a new kitchen and coatroom, then passed into an open space where another set of stairs led to a room on the top floor. These stairs were industrial, bright aluminum with handrails and well crafted.

  “It’s like something on a ship, isn’t it?” Bruce said as we climbed up.

  Here on this uppermost level, surrounded by a gangway, was a capsule-shaped chamber made of thick stainless steel with many huge bolts and fastenings, with a hatch on top and rounded ends that made it look like a miniature submarine. There were hoses and pipes feeding into it. And, importantly, attached near one end was a panel with a touchscreen.

  Bruce lifted up the hatch, which was at about head height, and I stretched up to peer inside. There, to churn the syrup as it went through the crystallization process, was a large screw running the length of the capsule, a magnified version of a flour grinder or meat grinder. “The syrup will be cooked with steam,” Bruce said, “but a vacuum pump will reduce the temperature to a hundred and ninety degrees so the sugar doesn’t caramelize.” That seemed clever, that you could use vacuum to reduce a boiling temperature. The room would be air conditioned, Bruce said, so there would be no condensation building on the metal parts. That was another new development for Joe James, who would no longer have to work in 80° to 90° heat.

  We went down a stairway to the second, or middle, floor. Here was another capsule, as large as the one above and with as many oversized nuts and bolts, but this one had a chute on top instead of a hatch. Through the chute the cooked sugar would drop down and be mixed with paddles. On the outside of this capsule were sensors, attached to and guiding the paddles. In this unit the sugar was cooled by means of a stack of refrigeration units placed outdoors.