Maple syrup is one of those foods that conjures up particular imagery – the trees, the color red, the forests, the sap dripping into metal buckets. And there is the conviviality of the sugar house pouring out into the snowy environment. The Sugar Rush: A Memoir of Wild Dream, Budding Bromance, and Making Maple Syrup by Peter Gregg tells the crazy adventures of two men who decide at a certain age to create their own sweet amber magic.
Evan Kleiman: What exactly is the process of sugaring?
Peter Gregg: In the transition time between winter and spring, trees send sap up their trunks loaded with sugar, and our job is to collect all that sap and evaporate the water that's in the sap and condense it down into syrup. It's this magical time of year, and it's about a six week window in between, winter and spring, from late February through March into early April. It's something that we've been doing for 300 years or so. We learned it through the indigenous peoples way back, and we have been doing it ever since in the northeast and in New England. The Upper Midwest is another big region. It's a special thing that takes place every year and we just love doing it.
Peter Gregg describes his exploits in sugaring with his best friend, Bert, in "The Sugar Rush: A Memoir of Wild Dream, Budding Bromance, and Making Maple Syrup." Photo courtesy of Pegasus Books.
How much sap do you get from a single tap?
The ratio, the conversion math, is about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup but that can vary. The trees have a mind of their own. Some days you get a lot of sugar in the sap, and some days not as much. But on average, over a season, it's about a 40 to 1 ratio. So we have to collect a lot of sap. On our farm, [we get] probably 50,000 gallons of sap over the course of the season, enough to fill a couple Olympic sized swimming pools.
And you have more than one tap on each tree.
Well, yes, that varies. It depends on the size of the tree. And there's some unwritten rules about that. A lot of sugar makers have just one tap per tree, and that's it. No more than that. Others, if the tree is big enough, let's say a 30 or 40-inch encumbrance of a tree, sometimes they'll put two in. On our farm, we have a few trees there. It's that size. I actually have one that's gotta be 150 to 200 years old. It is humongous. I've put three taps in that tree before and the tree is fine.
Does collecting the sap like this hurt the trees at all?
That's a great question. I get asked that one a lot, and I know you're asking it from a good place, you want to make sure that we're not doing anything that harms the tree. And we're not. The sugar maple is this remarkable species that has the ability to compartmentalize any wound and separate itself off from the rest of the tree. It just grows over the tap hole that we make so the tap holes that we're drilling into the trees to begin with are very small, like a pencil in diameter and about an inch and a half, two inches into the tree. By the time the next season rolls, we only put the taps in for those six weeks when we're making this collecting sap. But then after the season, and during the growing period, through the summer, the tree closes those holes up. It's this remarkable thing. It heals itself.
So in the mind's eye of many people, we imagine a tap on a tree with a galvanized metal bucket hanging from the tap with this ping. Then we imagine people collecting these buckets and pouring the sap from the bucket into a larger tank. I imagine that's not the way it's done anymore. Can you describe what goes on?
Yeah, that's certainly the romantic version. A lot of people start off that way. There's a lot of backyard sugar-makers that are still using buckets, not the galvanized ones as much. Those are really old school and a little bit out of fashion but they look great. If you've seen pictures of them, they just look great in the woods. They're cool to look at, but people don't use them as much anymore.
Now, they switch to plastic if you're going to collect in buckets, which is using gravity to get the sap out of the tree. But most sugar makers, including myself, use a pipeline, a plastic tubing system that runs all through the woods, connected from tree to tree, and then we hook it up to a vacuum pump and basically suck the sap down the hill. Maybe not quite as romantic but it's what we do now in modern sugar-making.
Did you grow up sugaring?
I didn't. That's the funny part about all this, and it's the theme of the book. I grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis. I have no business doing any of this stuff. I'm not mechanically inclined, really at all. I had to change a flat tire once, that's about the extent of my mechanical knowledge up till now. I've just been learning all this on the fly from my sugar-maker neighbors. That's the great thing about this industry, we all help each other out.
Because I come from Minnesota, a "flatlander," they call people like me, I'm the one that needs the most amount of help by a lot. But I'm learning. That's the cool thing about it, I am learning. I've learned a ton about plumbing. I've learned a ton about how equipment works. I've learned how to fix things, which is really a nice skill to have. You can just figure things out and how to repair them when they break. That's a big part of farming and a big part of what we do, just trying to figure this all out and measure up with all the big sugar makers in Vermont.
This book of yours, The Sugar Rush, is like a buddy movie. That's what it reminded me of. Tell me a little bit about your partner in sugaring mayhem and what each of you bring to the process.
His name is Bert, and he's my best friend. We've been making syrup together for a while. He's a lot like me but with a little more skills. He's a lot handier. He has a ton of tools but we're both office worker types trying to make it in this industry. Bert helps me out a lot.
The story of The Sugar Rush is me trying to hit this benchmark that all the big Vermont maple producers hit year after year. To hit that benchmark, we have to make basically twice as much syrup as we ever had before, so I have to convince Bert to help me out.
It's going to be this very labor-intensive, strenuous season. But he rallies to the cause and it turns out, it's a buddy movie, for sure. I love that analogy, and that's how I wrote the book. It's a lot of humor, there's a lot of conversations, and we analyze our lives in the stage of our lives right now as we're approaching late middle age and how sugaring factors into the satisfaction of our lives and what we hope for the future.
"One of the great things about making maple syrup is that you're making something that delights people," says Peter Gregg. "We're making something that brings joy to people's lives." Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.
What strikes me after reading The Sugar Rush is how DIY it all is. You have to love tinkering with tanks, lines, evaporators, and chainsaws, all in the forest, often slipping in snow or ice. What's the emotional payoff?
One of the great things about making maple syrup is that you're making something that delights people. That is probably one of the most satisfying things about making syrup. It's a sweetener. We're making something that brings joy to people's lives.