The Sugar Season

by Douglas Whynott

  IN EARLY APRIL Bruce again asked if I had seen the sugar machine lately. They were doing a test run, he said, and a consultant would be operating the machine. They had already made a batch that was hard as a rock, and they had to break it up and dig it out.

  We went into the building and climbed to the third story, where a group of people were assembled: Joe James, of course, and Kevin Bascom and his son Greg. A technician had come from Maine for the day to monitor the gaskets. An electrician was there. And the consultant, Howard Phykitt, an expert in pharmaceutical manufacturing and in this machine. When Bruce arrived they opened up the top hatch and pulled it back. The rank smell of overheated syrup rose into the air and, when you got close, burned the nose.

  Joe dug out a bunch of maple sugar and put it in paper cups. The sugar was like dough at first. “Wait until it’s cooled,” Phykitt said. He was looking pale, and the electrician worried that he was dehydrated and needed water, but Phykitt didn’t seem to care—he was determined to make the machine work successfully. With this new batch of sugar, he said to Bruce, who was on the ladder looking inside, “Not a good first run, but a good second run.” Phykitt said they should take some of this batch to David, who was in his office and didn’t think the sugar machine was going to work.

  When the sugar cooled and dried a little more it began to act like fresh brown sugar. “It’s a good color,” Phykitt said. “The same color as maple syrup.” Bruce, along with everyone else in the room, was sampling the sugar, pulling off pieces and chewing.

  “Lunch,” the electrician said.

  Bruce chewed some and turned thoughtful.

  Kevin had gotten on the ladder and was looking inside. Bruce whispered to me, “Kevin has a mechanical mind. This is a big puzzle to him. He’ll understand this machine throughout.”

  Joe took the sugar and put it into the refrigerator to see how it performed after more rapid cooling. Most importantly, Joe also was getting to know this new machine and taking notes. With the old machine he had done a lot of listening, and he had been trying to listen to this machine. One time some of the others saw him put his ear up against the machine. They laughed and told him he no longer needed to do that. But Joe intended to keep listening. He missed using his nose. “I can’t smell it,” he said. “It’s all closed up.”

  Joe returned a few minutes later with pieces of maple sugar on a tray. They were almost like hard candy. Everybody started working on them. Bruce grabbed a piece the size of a hatchet head and broke off a piece with his teeth. He chewed and took on that thoughtful look again.

  “Good,” he said through a mouthful of sugar.

  Outside he was liking what he saw. The day helped boost his optimism—the trees were greening and the scent of the dairy farm was drifting up the hill. Buoyed, maybe even on a sugar high, he said of the sugar machine, “Most people could not do this. You have to be fearless to do something like this.”

  BRUCE SCHEDULED HIS spring Open House for the weekend after the Vermont Maple Festival. It was meant to provide a final statement on the season.

  Bascom’s was the ideal place for a party, with its hilltop site, isolated location, and views that made you think big. Sugarmakers came from Maine and Quebec, from New York and, in some years, even Ohio. Some brought and sold syrup before taking in the events of the day.

  Leader had one of their big evaporators set up in the parking lot, throwing off steam, while folks gathered around to watch and ask questions. Bruce and David had scheduled a range of classes, and in parts of the warehouse, amid stacks of tubing and used equipment, experts talked about vacuum, reverse osmosis, sap hydraulics, the selling of sap, and the lighter topics such as making candy. Employees were moved over to the New Building to serve food, which, of course, was free to anyone who wanted it. Tables were spread out where pallets had been yesterday or in aisles among racks of packed syrup. Woodsmen wandered around everywhere.

  I began the day with Alvin Clark while Steve Childs, a maple specialist from Cornell, talked about making maple confections and selling them at fairs. Childs covered cotton candy, maple candy, maple cream, maple marshmallows, maple nuts, maple cheesecake, maple ice cream, and we kept getting up for samples with each demonstration. By the time he finished I too was thinking of how I could sell all things maple or even open a café themed only for maple, as it was all so delicious and inspiring—and not a pancake to be seen.

  Bruce was wandering about that day—he was the host, greeting the special arrivals and very important people. When Carole Rouleau appeared, dressed as though for a night out, with her companion, Silvie, who I had once seen at Bureau’s inspecting syrup with her hair up in silver blond ringlets, Bruce practically bowed to them before he led them away to the New Cooler and showed them the tanks, the touch screen, the rotary fillers, the sugar machine, and the barrels in the basement.

  Five guys had worked in the Cooler in 2011, and the trucks had been lined up twenty deep that morning. Bascom’s paid out $230,000 during that Open House. This year they saw half as many trucks and fewer amounts of syrup on them, and only two guys worked. Greg had a chair set up this year. In the afternoon I saw Greg loading six barrels into a van. He exclaimed, “Selling! I don’t remember selling last year!”

  Joe was helping out in the Cooler, but basically he was just hanging around. Joe was back working on the old sugar machine again while a valve was being replaced on the new one. Joe said they had made thirteen test batches on the new machine. They had used 250 gallons per batch, $100,000 worth of syrup in all.

  At lunchtime Bruce was with two other guests, Steve Jones of Maple Grove, and Haven King. I knew Steve Jones, having visited him at Maple Grove the year before and made an unusual connection—we had both been born in the same hospital on Cape Cod and delivered by the same doctor. Steve Jones had a Cape sense of humor. I asked if I could join them and, by way of lightening the situation, he said, “Sure, it’s all bullshit anyway.”

  My visit to the Maple Grove plant and its relative vastness had put the Bascom operation into perspective. I had first stopped in at the gift shop and learned about the history, how Maple Grove started out as a candy operation begun by two women and had grown through successive generations. I saw on a video that each year Maple Grove made 40 million nips of maple syrup, 1.5-ounce containers used in restaurants, and I learned from Jones that they were blended syrup, that during the shortage of 2008 they had to switch over and then didn’t go back to pure because of cost. Jones told me, as Bruce had, that the price of syrup was getting too high, that it had nearly doubled since 2007, when it was $10 a quart in the large supermarkets and was $18 now. A major cause for the hike was the shortage in 2008, when everyone had to raise prices. Then the Canadian dollar got stronger. The Canadian dollar had been worth about 70 cents only a few years ago. Jones also wondered, like Bruce, whether there was a market crisis ahead.

  He took me on a tour of the factory, and if you could say that a packing line had some magic built into it, then you could say it about this one. Watching it move reminded me of the way I once felt when I saw a spectacular model train set in a toy store, running around the room on a shelf just out of reach. The machines were old, but they ran smoothly; Maple Grove had five mechanics working to maintain them, Jones said. They had two large rotary fillers, each capable of filling 250 jugs per minute—together the systems could fill 500 jugs per minute. We stood in our white coats with our goggles on and watched them stream by like an upbeat boogie-woogie. It was that magical.

  Maple Grove was selling to Walmart and to BJ’s—they had opened up the big club supermarkets. They were doing $80 million a year in sales, though not all was pure maple. Maple Grove sold blended and fruit syrups too, along with pancake mixes and salad dressings. At that time they were the largest purveyor of crystallized maple candy, with sales of $1 million a year. They seemed far out of reach in the race that Bruce seemed to be running. But that seemed to have changed in May 2012, when I sat down with Bruce, Steve Jones, and Haven Ki
ng. One major change was that Jones had retired from Maple Grove. He and Bruce were conferring on possibilities, perhaps a year from now, though they weren’t saying much.

  Jones said that Maple Grove was backing off on the candy business. “It brings in a million a year, but for B & G [the company that owns Maple Grove] that’s a pittance in a six hundred–million dollar company.” The candy cost a lot to make anyway, and there was little profit. Additionally, the market was falling off because they now shipped the candy to a warehouse in Pennsylvania and sold it from New Jersey. “People who own gift shops in Vermont don’t want to deal with calling New Jersey and talking to someone who doesn’t know anything about candy, and then having to pay for shipping. They used to deliver it from St. Johnsbury. No more.”

  Bruce jumped right on that. “Who’s going to take over that supply? We have a packing plant in Brattleboro that’s eventually going to move up here.” They produced a thousand pounds of candy a day on machines that Arnold Coombs’s grandmother had previously owned.

  I talked to Haven King, who worked for Maple Grove for many years and was buying syrup now on a contract basis in semiretirement. He had been buying for twenty-eight years. He had worked on quality control at Maple Grove before volunteering to receive barrels. That led to working in the field, visiting producers, and buying syrup, a more enjoyable pursuit. Later, when Maple Grove moved to buying nearly all Canadian syrup and built a warehouse in St. Evariste, near Real Bureau, he helped design the facility.

  Of the 2012 season Haven King said he had seen something never observed before—maple trees producing sap in 80° weather.

  Bruce said that Haven had picked his pocket a few times. Bruce tried to hire him away at one point. Haven said, “You offered to pay me fifteen cents a pound,” and Bruce replied. “You would have had good luck getting that the second year.”

  They talked about the season, of course. “Below average,” was how Steve Jones put it. He thought the Canadians would produce 90 million pounds, and Bruce thought the same. Jones said there were 38 million pounds in the Federation surplus.

  “Thirty-seven,” Bruce said.

  The crop in Somerset County was good, Bruce said. There were sixty to seventy trailer loads on the Golden Road and at St. Aurelie. “Most of it’s downstairs,” he said. Which was not literally true, only fifteen loads were there now, but figuratively true: much of it would be downstairs before summer ended.

  As was Bruce’s way, he cajoled and was going back and forth with Steve Jones—the games traders played.

  Bruce said, “You do about twelve million pounds a year up there.”

  Steve said they would be doing fewer. Then he said, “So do you.”

  Haven added, “When you count the sugar.”

  “That’s probably true,” Bruce said.

  Had I heard what I thought I’d heard? They were both doing 12 million pounds a year when it came to buying and processing pure maple syrup?

  So that was it, then. Bruce had reached his goal. He was no longer in the second tier. Bruce was in the first tier now, an equal to Maple Grove. That is, if it wasn’t all bullshit.

  THE NEXT MORNING, when I ran into Bruce, he said with urgency, “Robert Poirier is here, have you seen him?” The most honored guest. We went looking and found Robert standing with his son-in-law in a tubing class.

  First we had lunch. Bruce talked about supply, saying, “In the next three weeks there will be no syrup anywhere.”

  Robert looked about, at the piles of food on the table, the many people milling about, and said, “Bruce, you must have spent ten thousand dollars on this.”

  “Probably more than that,” Bruce replied. “But people come here and they come back six months later. Last year they spent a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars both days in the store.”

  Bruce said he had so much on his mind these days, he was getting forgetful. “I paid a hundred thousand dollars to one producer and didn’t even remember I had done it.”

  Robert smiled and said it was true. He then asked Bruce if he wanted him to buy 600 drums from the producer named Landry, the one who had 167,000 taps, but Bruce didn’t answer. He then got up to talk to someone and Robert said, “Bruce is too hard. Sometimes he says he wants to buy syrup, and then after it’s bought he says he shouldn’t have bought it.”

  Robert asked, “Why does Bruce expand so much?”

  “I think he wants to prove he can do it better.”

  Robert smiled. “The first year with me, they had just the small cooler. We sent eight loads, four or five hundred drums. Second year, twelve loads. Third year, eighteen loads.”

  After lunch Bruce took Robert on a tour. I tagged along, and we were joined by Cindy Finck, who worked with Arnold Coombs in Brattleboro. Cindy grew up in the same town as Arnold and, as a teenager, worked for Bob Coombs. Now she had a sizeable job—Cindy was responsible for selling the maple sugar.

  We went to the bottling room first of all, and Bruce showed Robert how the syrup could be dialed in according to grade and then pumped through the tanks and filters on the way to the bottling lines. “They are running forty quarts a minute,” Bruce said. “They could run eighty quarts a minute and fill two trailer trucks in eight hours.”

  Bruce led Robert through the Middle Cooler and toward the sugar room. Cindy Finck trailed behind. She seemed surprised. “Arnold always told me the sugar plant was top secret,” she said.

  We climbed the stairs, and Bruce explained the process, the cooking with steam and the use of vacuum to draw off heat and liquid. Then the second stage downstairs, where the sugar cooled and dried. Finally the third stage on the bottom floor, where the sugar was screened and put into barrels.

  “It takes about two and a half hours to make a batch,” Bruce said.

  Robert kept looking at the parts and ran his hands over the bolts and fastenings. Bruce explained that a valve on the second floor was faulty and would be replaced at a cost of $35,000. Robert shook his head. The machine would shut down for a couple of weeks.

  Cindy said she didn’t like hearing that the machine would be shut down. She had been talking to some companies about huge orders. Frito-Lay was considering buying 1.5 million pounds of maple sugar. General Mills was interested.

  She said that during the economic downturn the interest in maple sugar did not drop. “Chocolatiers are on a run to use maple sugar,” she said. She and Arnold were trying out recipes.

  Bruce led us to the room with the silos, seven of them that each hold 8000 gallons, about $250,000 worth of syrup. They were holding tanks, Bruce said. They pumped the barrels into the silos, and the syrup went straight into the filtering presses and bottling units.

  We went down into the New Cooler, where Bruce described the well-planned dimensions. He said there were eight bays on each side of the basement, sixteen in all, each set off by a support post. If a bay was packed correctly, it would hold 500,000 pounds of syrup, or twelve trailer loads. Even more precisely, each single row of barrels, four high and all the way back to the wall, represented a single trailer load.

  “Eight million pounds altogether, in the whole cooler,” Bruce said.

  There was no response, just a thoughtful moment. Robert was smiling.

  “I will be able to fill this cooler in five years. I don’t have the money now.”

  But maybe the bank would help him out, he said. Maybe give him some more gas. So he could ride a little more, a little further.

  EPILOGUE

  IN JUNE OF 2012, in the early evening, I walked by the sugarhouse to Bruce’s house, the stone house. The flower gardens, tended by Deb Rhoades, were in full bloom. The late-day sun was lighting up the tall grass, while swallows flew over the seed heads, chasing bugs. Bruce was waiting on the patio, taking in the scene. “Nice piece of real estate,” he said.

  I had come to talk about the season. It had been a season of contradictions, and at the center was the paradox of expansion: the Federation had set up the ideal scenario for expa
nsion in the United States, which had brought new players and increased tap counts, which could potentially increase supply in a season other than this one, a supply that Bruce was happy to direct into his Coolers. But it was also a supply that could possibly weaken the Federation, which had stabilized the industry, and bring a surplus to the market that could cause a crash in prices, resulting in a fallout of new producers. And round it went, during this strangest of sugar seasons: expansion was good but expansion was perilous.

  “There was a discussion at Leader at the director’s meeting last week,” Bruce said. “Everybody unanimously thinks this expansion is a bubble. They think it might be good for another two years, another five years, but they think at some point there will be too much maple syrup and the barrel price will fall.

  “The only reason it hasn’t dropped is because of Federation support in Canada. But at some point, I keep saying this over and over, they won’t be able to control it because the Americans will be making too much syrup. It’s the same old song—eventually supply and demand comes into play, and you’ve got to sell the stuff. The biggest thing in the maple industry in the future is going to be sales and marketing, getting people to buy it. Always has been, always will be.”

  In what may have been a counterdevelopment, the exchange rate had made a dramatic shift over the last three weeks in favor of the US dollar, and Canadian syrup was now cheaper than US syrup. “But it’s too late for me,” Bruce said. “I’ve spent most of my capital.” Bascom’s had taken in forty-nine trailer loads in May, with six trailer loads in a day and a half in June. A couple had yet to arrive—loads pieced together by Michael Parker west of Lake Champlain and Erwin Gingerich in Ohio. Bruce now had 6 million pounds stored away.

  I wanted to know if the bulk supply in the United States had all been purchased, as Bruce had predicted those many times.