100% Pure Sap Happy!

“It’s an addiction,” says Rob Leab as he looks down into a cauldron of boiling sap that bubbles, heaves, and foams like a witch’s brew. “I got hooked on sugaring eighteen years ago when I put a few buckets on the maple trees in our front yard and boiled the sap on the kitchen stove.”

Leab, a stocky, muscular, thirty-eight-year-old with cropped dark hair, is nearly invisible in a cloud of steam that swirls around the sugar shack. He dips a long-handled scoop into the hot sap and watches carefully as the liquid slides off the blade, then checks the bold-faced thermometer. It stands steady at 219 degrees. “It’s done,” he says, as he turns the spigot and watches the viscous liquid pour from the evaporator into a metal pail.

For Leab, maple sugaring is a passion that satisfies his need to be involved with the earth and a part of the natural cycles of nature. In the early spring, when the days grow longer, the sun feels stronger, and the snow gives way to bare ground, there’s a smell in the air, he says, that’s intoxicating ... a smell that says winter is over and the sap is about to flow.

“Waiting for that first sign of sap is an anxious time,” Leab says. “You may be ready, but nothing happens until nature says it’s ready.” Sometime in late February or early March, when temperatures still drop below freezing at night, but daytime temperatures top forty degrees, the sap starts to move in the trees. Then, on one bright sunny morning, it begins to drip from the spouts and sugaring season is underway. Hard as it is to predict when the sap will start flowing, it’s easy to determine when the season ends. As soon as the buds come out on the trees—usually by mid-April—it’s all over. “The sap turns yellowish,” says Leab. “It tastes bitter and smells like old socks if you boil it.”

Tapping trees and making maple syrup is satisfying, Leab says, because it’s a throwback to a less complicated time. The work of sugaring is simplicity itself: drill a hole 5/16-inch in diameter about one-inch deep into a sugar maple tree and attach a plastic hose, which will carry the sap in a continuous flow down to the sugarhouse to be boiled and turned into syrup. “We don’t use individual sap-collecting buckets anymore,” Leab explains. “Though they’re traditional and picturesque, in a big operation like ours they require too much trudging through the woods.”

Twenty years ago, Leab went off to Connecticut for college to study diesel engineering. But as he came to know the people he’d be working with and the kind of work he’d be doing, he realized how much he would miss the land, his family, and the people of Hancock, Massachusetts. So he quit school and has been managing his family’s Ioka Valley Farm ever since.

“At first I made syrup because it was fun,” Leab says. “Then I realized I might be able to make a business out of it. My father was skeptical, and he threw down a challenge: ‘I’ll bet you can’t do as well from maple syrup,’ he said, ‘as I do from my seed corn business.’” That’s all the incentive young Leab needed. Today, Ioka Valley Farm taps four thousand trees and produces nearly two thousand gallons of syrup each year, earning a respectable profit.

The addiction Leab first referred to is a positive one: the end result of his work is a wholesome product that he’s proud to sell; the process is diverse enough to hold his interest; and sugaring is kind to the land.

“This appeals to my sense of ecology,” Leab says. “When the season’s over, the woods look just the same as before, and the trees are just as healthy.”

While Leab watches over his steaming evaporator in Hancock, another man is tapping trees and boiling sap on a smaller scale just twenty miles away in Old Chatham, New York. Eric Wilska is a maple syrup hobbyist: he makes syrup for the pure joy of it. Wilska has three hundred and fifty buckets on trees around his Sticky Fingers Farm (he produces honey, too, ergo the name) that yield him about forty gallons of maple syrup a year. The buckets aren’t very efficient, he admits, but his goal isn’t to make as much syrup as possible—it’s to enjoy making it as much as possible. Half of his product he gives away, and the other half he sells at his bookstore, the Bookloft, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

 “This is a great avocation,” he says. “It keeps me outdoors, which I love, and it fulfills my need to do something creative. Sugaring appeals to my respect for the past and gives me the pleasure of teaching the art to my nine-year-old son, Kelt.”

At six-feet-three-inches tall, Wilska is as lean and energetic as a greyhound, with a mane of thick dark hair streaked with gray that looks a little wild after it’s been in the wind. His enthusiasm for sugaring infects friends and neighbors, as well as Kelt’s school pals, many of whom stop by during the season to help collect the sap from the buckets and sit around the fire and pass the time. “I love the camaraderie of the whole process,” Wilska says. And if helpers get scarce, Wilska always has the companionship of Jip, his affable golden Labrador who spends most of his time getting in the way.

Wilska’s innovative spirit is apparent throughout the sugarhouse. His evaporator looks strikingly like a moonshine still. A spiraled copper pipe hangs over the pan where the steam rises, warming the sap before it gets to the pan. “I call this my Jed Clampett,” he laughs, “right out of the Beverly Hillbillies.” Collecting the sap is an adventure: Wilska drives his Kubota tractor to all of the taps and empties the buckets into two big containers mounted on its front loader. When his tractor groans under the weight, he returns to the sugarhouse and unloads.

Wilska taps his trees in New York, the state that produces more maple syrup than any other except for Vermont. With more than three hundred farms making maple syrup in Massachusetts (nearly fifty in the region), the state is a fairly minor player in the maple syrup game, ranking only eighth in the nation. “But all the states are small potatoes compared with Quebec, Canada,” says Wilska.  “They’re the OPEC of maple syrup, producing more than eighty percent of all the maple syrup made in North America.”

Though Wilska’s equipment isn’t as elaborate as Leab’s, his techniques of boiling the sap into syrup are the same. Like Leab, Wilska must watch the boiling sap carefully, measuring its density with a hydrometer and temperature with a thermometer until that magical moment when tree sap suddenly becomes pure maple syrup. As a backup method of determining if the syrup is ready, both men dip metal scoops into the hot liquid and hold it up to see how it drips; individual drops means that it’s not ready yet; if it flows in a flat sheet (called aproning), it’s done. Veteran sugarers can tell when it’s ready by the way the bubbles glisten on the surface and by the syrup’s aroma and color. “It’s remarkable what happens to sap when it’s boiled,” Leab says. “It comes from the tree at two percent sugar and leaves the evaporator at sixty-six percent sugar.”

Turning sap into maple sugar candy is another story, requiring the same process as making maple syrup, except the sap is boiled to an even higher temperature. After the sap reaches 235 to 244 degrees and starts to thicken, it’s cooled to 155 degrees, stirred and poured into little molds to harden. This is tricky business, though, because if you make it too hot the batch turns rock solid and you may need a hammer to break it out of the evaporator. “Frankly,” says Leab, “I don’t have the patience or the skill for making maple sugar candy, so we don’t make it at Ioka Valley Farm.”

Hard maple candy was a popular treat for Native Americans in the Northeast long before the Pilgrims came to these shores. They made it by dropping hot rocks into sap-filled wooden bowls, birch bark vessels or clay pots. They couldn’t boil the sap over open fires because they didn’t have flame-proof containers until the colonists introduced them to metal pots. It’s speculated that Indians discovered the sweet secret of maple trees by eating “sapsicles” —the icicles of frozen maple sap that form on the ends of broken twigs. Leab says he still enjoys an occasional sapsicle when he’s out working in the woods.

Like the Wilska family in Old Chatham, the Leabs are the third generation to work the farm, and their children are the fourth to live there. “My grandfather,” says Rob Leab, “drove thirteen head of cattle  over Brodie Mountain from Lanesborough, Massachusetts, in 1936, and raised them on the property we now own. It was tough going in the beginning. The land was labeled ‘poor’ because the soil was so worn out. But my father and grandfather worked hard and introduced scientific practices that kept the farm going.”

But in today’s economy, the status quo isn’t good enough. So the Leabs have given their place a fresh source of income by getting into agri-tourism—allowing the public to share the farming experience. In sugaring season, as many as two hundred people visit each day to watch the syrup-making process and eat pancakes drenched in maple syrup at the farm restaurant next to the sugarhouse.

Maple sugaring in a tourist-oriented farm requires extra hands, and the Leabs have found two exceptional workers in John and Terri Anne Koepp—a retired couple from Lebanon Springs, New York, who educate and entertain visitors. On entering the sugarhouse, a visitor is met by Terri Anne, a petite, energetic, gray-haired woman who delivers her spiel with the gusto of a carnival barker.

“Now ladies and gentlemen,” she says, holding up a pitcher, “this is pure maple syrup—no additives, no fake color, no nothing but pure distilled maple sap. And by law you can’t say pure on the label if it isn’t so. That’s why these store-bought syrups like Log Cabin, Vermont Maid (which, by the way, comes from New Jersey) and Aunt Jemima can’t label themselves as maple syrup. The fact is they’re all made from corn syrup and water and artificial flavors.”

“And let me tell you this,” she says, warming to her subject, “pure maple syrup not only tastes good, but it’s good for you.” All this time she’s preparing samples of different grades of syrup and variations such as maple barbecue syrup and maple bread pudding and handing them out to visitors.

“These manufactured syrups,” she continues with obvious disdain, “have sixty calories per tablespoon. Sugar has fifty-seven calories and pure maple syrup has only forty.” She takes money and hands over jugs of syrup. “Somebody just asked me how long maple syrup lasts. The answer is … forever!” she says with evangelical fervor. “If it gets sugary, just heat it up. Maple syrup and honey are the only two foods that heal themselves.” Ten minutes later, Terri Anne is still giving her breathless pitch for maple syrup, and she hasn’t repeated herself yet. When she takes a break, the crowd applauds.

In the back of the sugarhouse, Terri Anne’s husband, John, oversees the process of turning sap into syrup. He opens the firebox to throw in a log, and the room fills with the orange glow of flames. He climbs the stairs with his hydrometer to test the density of the fluid and squirts vegetable oil into the brew to calm the bubbling. “What does sap taste like?” asks someone in the crowd. John replies that sap is as thin and clear as water and, in fact, tastes like water. “If I gave you a glass of each,” he says, “you probably couldn’t tell the difference.” John Koepp is a big man in his late sixties with a gray, Lincolnesque beard, faded denim clothes, and a Yankee talent for saying a lot with few words. The crescendo of his performance comes when he releases the syrup from the evaporator, and the amber-colored liquid pours into a stainless steel pail on the ground while the visitors’ cameras click away.

Now that it’s winter, Leab, Wilska, and all the other maple syrup producers in the region have begun to count the days until the ice breaks atop the pond, water trickles down the culverts, and the back roads are axle-deep in mud.

“That’s nature’s way of telling us the time has come,” Leab says. “Nature’s way of saying … let the games begin.” [JAN/FEB 2010]

Peter McLaughlin is a frequent contributor to Berkshire Living. His story on the reopening of Mount Greylock, “At Its Peak,” appeared in the October 2009 issue.

Beetle Mania

As Rob Leab and his fellow maple syrup producers in western Massachusetts enjoy one good harvest after another, a great dark cloud gathers over the industry in eastern Massachusetts. The insidious Asian longhorned beetle has gained a foothold in maple trees around Worcester, and that, says Leab, “should scare the hell out of all of us.” If left unchecked, this shiny black beetle with white spots and long, black-and-white-striped antennae has the potential to kill every maple tree and most other hardwoods in New England. It has no natural enemies, is immune to every poison, and has a voracious appetite for trees, especially maples. The only way to control it is to chop down the trees it infests and burn the wood.

Tom McCrumm, former director of the Massachusetts Maple Producers Association, says that this scourge could be worse than Dutch elm disease, chestnut blight, and gypsy moth infestations combined. “And it wouldn’t just kill the maple sugar industry,” he says, “but ruin the hardwood logging business and tourism as well.”

The Asian long-horned beetle came to America about ten years ago in wooden packing crates from China. In the beginning, those in the maple sugar business were ambivalent about the threat, feeling it was a problem somewhere else. But now that the full magnitude of the infestation is evident, the industry is in full battle gear, working closely with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to find the beetles and destroy them.

The Asian long-horned beetle frequently travels via firewood that people cut in one place and transport to another—so it can pop up anywhere in the state, at any time. If you think you see one of these beetles, please call the Massachusetts office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture at 508.799.8330.

THE GOODS

Ioka Valley Farm
Route 43
Hancock, Mass.
413.738.5915