A testing period would soon begin, which was the reason Joe was building up that surplus. No telling how long it would last. Bruce said, “David and I both think there’s a hundred thousand dollar mistake in here somewhere.”
Another stairway led down to the basement of the building to the sifter. This unit had conveyer belts with screens that would move rapidly and separate the sugar into powder and grain. The finished sugar would drop from the sifter into barrels.
In the next room the old sugar machine was cranking away, and Bruce said that the interior wall between the two rooms would soon be taken down. I looked through the window and saw the old sifter vibrating, like a cement mixer on springs.
We climbed back to the top floor and stopped by the cooking capsule again. “With this,” Bruce said, “we will be able to make all the sugar America needs for a very long time.”
A lofty goal. It was weird to think that this product, dry sugar, was made by Indians and by the sugarmakers of 150 years ago during the Civil War, during the no-sugar-made-by-slaves era, and that 50 years later folks around here had been making it in pans in their kitchen.
“It’s impressive,” I said to Bruce in response to his question earlier. This was another huge project, especially considering the cooler down at the other end of all these buildings. “You’ve grown so much in the past two years.”
“We’re now at the point where I can’t run everything on my own. I could run the warehouses and all that goes on there if I focused just on that. But I can’t focus just on that. I’ve got too many other things to do.”
He said more quietly, “It’s not easy to motivate tiers of people to make everything run smoothly.”
“Could someone like Tom Zaffis run this for you?” I asked. Bruce had mentioned Zaffis, saying it seemed less likely he would come.
“We’d need two people, two managers.” He chuckled and said, “We’ve gotten big.”
“You already were big.”
“If I die, no telling what will happen. They’ll have to sell out parts of it.”
He was thinking about the possibility of getting several part-owners involved, giving stock to several people “and then letting them fight it out.”
When we left the building Bruce heard a sound, the banging of steel barrels. The noise was coming from the area on the other side of his house, a flat open space where they stored barrels. “Let’s go over there and see what’s going on,” he said.
As we walked by his house Bruce said, “Barrel organization is a problem. We’re going to have to devote someone to it full time someday.”
The area was large enough for a trailer truck to turn around, and along the edges were stacks of barrels of a multitude of origins. There were barrels with embossed lids that read American Maple, R.C. Coombs, Jacques & Bureau, Carey Maple (the forerunner of Maple Grove), and dozens of contemporary sugarmakers from the United States and Canada.
Three men were loading barrels from one of the stacks, tossing them into a long trailer. The three worked in the coolers—Dave St. Aubin, the cooler manager; Greg Minard, who worked with him; and Brooke Adams, who spent all of his time cleaning or moving barrels. Brooke had done other jobs at Bascom’s, but he preferred steam cleaning barrels and took a philosophical approach to it. “I do barrels,” he said with a note of importance to its utmost necessity at the base of the business. “The only guy who can make a career out of steaming barrels,” Bruce had said to him once. Brooke thought about barrels and even talked to his barrels. He could—I saw him do it—walk along and roll two barrels on their edges at one time. Brooke cleaned 100 barrels a day, 500 a week, 2000 a month, 24,000 barrels a year.
We watched them work for a while for the fun of it. Greg Minard, who was a football player a few years ago, tended to pick them up and throw them with a chest pass. Brooke, leaner and longer, had a way of putting his body into it, with a turn, twist, and toss.
These barrels were headed to Moravia, New York, to a man named Dan Weed, who was one of Bruce’s sub-buyers, his agents. Bruce controlled seventy-five percent of the bulk market in New York through the efforts of people like Weed.
I had met him two months ago when I traveled with Bruce to the annual maple conference in Verona, New York. Weed had a booth there. He told me he got into making maple syrup in the mid-1990s after his daughter received a gift of maple spouts from her grandparents. He helped her tap some trees and boil the sap. Now Weed owned a sizeable sugarhouse and worked in partnership with his son, buying syrup and selling it to Bruce. Weed also told me in Verona that his brother was involved too, that he made pancake mixes.
“And you can’t get a closer relationship than that,” Weed said. It was probably true, though you had to think about those other relationships on the table, about cream and coffee, bacon and eggs, vanilla and chocolate, cheese and hamburger, lettuce and tomato, peanut butter and jelly, you could go on and on—but this effort here, this was all about that special relationship with the pancake.
Sugar was a different story, though, an old timer now a newcomer on the market. In further news Bruce soon told me that Gold Coast had made an order for 50,000 pounds of maple sugar in six-ounce bags. Joe James started working overtime again.
11
YOU NEED A MOUNTAIN
INSIDE THE STORE on the whiteboard were the words, “We made 5000 gallons!” Kevin boiled on February 29, the only boil in that ten-day interval after the big run. The boil was after two days of what he called “a light run” on the chart, but it was a substantial day, when he made 1022 gallons, and it moved the total 2012 production up to 5040 gallons. And so the announcement on this Saturday, March 3.
A snowstorm had passed through, large enough for moderate rejoicing. Eight inches fell on March 1, an inch on Friday, March 2, and another inch was coming down on that Saturday we spent in the store.
Bruce’s neighbor Alvin Clark, an eighty-year-old sugarmaker, was one of those rejoicing. After the snowstorm Alvin gathered up his flat pans, went to his backyard, filled them with snow, and put them in his freezer. Alvin even froze some icicles and snowballs, thinking he might use them in July.
On that Saturday morning a man came up to the counter with a stack of books and said he drove 145 miles, all the way from Connecticut. He had tapped the four giant maples on his property that spring and hung eleven buckets. He said he was collecting twenty-five gallons of sap a day. “It’s flowing so hard you don’t hardly hear any breaks between drops,” he said. He felt that because he was harvesting the sap from his trees, he had a responsibility to do something with it.
“I came all the way up here for these books,” he said to Bruce, who got up from his stool, looked at the stack, and said he liked the manual from Ohio State University. The man said he had made two gallons of syrup so far, boiling in a turkey cooker. It was a very light syrup, much lighter than the syrup in the display bottles on the shelf over by the wall.
“That syrup in those bottles is all Fancy grade,” Bruce said. Fancy being the Vermont term for the highest and lightest grade of syrup—you couldn’t make syrup unless you could make fancy, I heard Vermonters say. “Some of the bottles are larger than the others, and the syrup looks darker because of that.”
The man from Connecticut wanted to know how to improve. Should he buy an evaporator? Another customer who was standing nearby said he lived in Connecticut too, but he grew up in New Hampshire. He offered some advice, then they traded phone numbers and went to look at the new evaporators.
While Bruce worked out a deal on some used equipment outdoors at the back of a pickup truck, I went into the Cooler to see what was happening there. Business at the Cooler was slow so far this year, unlike 2011 when the trucks had lined up at the door, and lately Dave St. Aubin had been relegated to the store, bagging spouts. Though there were some busy days. Bruce bought several truckloads of commercial syrup and Dave was organizing those, and Bruce was buying lots of 2011 syrup that some producers had been holding onto in case of a shorta
ge but were now unloading. A truckload of syrup had come in from Pennsylvania Amish country via Henry Brennaman after a good start there. On this Saturday Dave was weighing syrup brought in by a Vermont sugarmaker, Jed Wheeler, who lived in the part of the state they call the Northeast Kingdom, near the Canadian border. His company was called Jed’s Maple Products, and among their products was a line of mustards sold at Whole Foods supermarkets. Wheeler was an engineer before returning to where he grew up to run a maple business with his wife and family. There was snowfall in the Northeast Kingdom too, nearly three feet of snow. “We’re about four inches away from going out on snowshoes to clear snow from under the mainlines,” he said. The sap hadn’t run yet in the Northeast Kingdom.
As we talked, someone appeared in the doorway—the man from Connecticut. He wanted to know where to find the used equipment. Next door, Dave St. Aubin said, in the next warehouse. Off he went, the newest, most earnest sugarmaker.
THE SAP RAN SLOWLY during that first March weekend, but Kevin boiled on Monday, managing to make 279 gallons. The temperatures on Monday and Tuesday were too cold for a run—5° on Tuesday, March 6, not getting above freezing in the afternoon.
Things were about to change however, according to the new forecast. Wednesday called for temperatures in the high fifties. On Thursday, March 8, temperatures were supposed to reach 6o°.
Of that Bruce said, “We’ll be making grade A-dark with sixty-degree weather. Up north everything will let loose.”
He told me he made a trip to northern Vermont, making the rounds of the maple supply companies in the northwest corner of the state. He visited Dominion & Grimm, CDL, LaPierre, and Leader. They had good news.
“Biggest tubing sales ever,” Bruce said. “A million new taps, that’s the estimate.” He meant a million in the United States.
That seemed an exaggeration, given that the USDA estimate for the United States was an increase of 191,000 taps in 2012, for a figure of 9,771,000 taps in all. The USDA, however, had reported an increase of nearly a half-million taps since 2010. Bruce thought the USDA figures were underreported, that there was too much diverse and hidden activity to assess accurately.
During a lull in the store Bruce called out to me, “There’s a sugarhouse you should visit.” He stopped there on his trip to talk about buying syrup. “Georgia Mountain Maples. This sugarhouse cost several thousands of dollars to build.”
I asked if it was a tax write-off.
“No, these people make money, they don’t lose it. This sugarhouse was built by the Harrison family. They have a very successful concrete business.”
He described the place. The floor was made of black concrete buffed to look like marble. At the entryway hung a chandelier made of copper maple leafs. Etched into the concrete below the chandelier was a copper-colored maple leaf. The building was a post-and-beam structure, very smartly done, nothing wasteful. A red roof made it stand out from a distance.
“They have about twenty-five thousand taps and will put in another thirty thousand next year. The want to get up to a hundred thousand.” Bruce smiled and said, “They were embarrassed to tell me that they only have twenty-five thousand taps.”
There was a greater point to this bold construction. “This is an example of people with money getting into the maple business.” The industry was promising enough now to make big investments, and banks were lending. Bruce said the new generation didn’t have to do it the way he had, developing slowly by reinvesting profits each year, edging ahead with an eye on the syrup price.
I had a couple of free days ahead, and they happened to be on March 7 and 8, when the forecast was for high temperatures. When everything would let loose up north, if Bruce was right.
I DROVE THREE HOURS traversing Vermont before heading along a back road through Milton. When I reached Georgia Mountain and stopped and saw the red roof, I understood Bruce’s enthusiasm. The building sat up on the slope, near enough to be accessible but high enough for a lofty view.
I drove up the hill and parked by a truck, found a side door, and went inside. The room seemed enormous, like a dance floor, except for the supersized evaporator near the other end. A man wearing a baseball cap came into the room. His name was Marty Rabtoy. He was one of the three owners of Georgia Mountain Maples. His brother-in-law Kevin Harrison, president of Harrison Concrete, was also a part-owner. Another brother-in-law, Rick Fielding, who worked in construction and built the sugarhouse, was a third owner.
Marty worked for Harrison Concrete, but for now he was running the evaporator. The timing of the sugar season was perfect for him because concrete work was slow in the changeover from ice to mud. Marty was thirty or so, of average height and build, with large, thick hands. I asked him how all this came to be.
“We’re Vermonters,” he said. “We’re all into this sugaring a little bit. I used to gather buckets with a guy down the road when I was a kid, but that’s a little different.”
He said there were lots of visitors. “From everywhere, even from Canada. They see the big red roof from Route 7, figure it’s a sugarhouse, and decide to go see it.” US Route 7 was two miles away across a valley.
“We’re a typical Vermont sugarhouse,” he said, “with an edge.”
I took “edge” to mean what Bruce talked about, that they went at this pursuit all out, right from the beginning.
“Edge” may have also meant Franklin County, Vermont. Franklin County, in the uppermost northwestern part of the state, produced a third of the Vermont maple syrup crop and ten percent of the maple syrup crop in the entire United States. In Franklin Country were several sugarhouses with tap counts equal to or greater than Bascom’s. On one road that ran from Fletcher to Fairfield, I had been told, there were more than 500,000 taps among the many sugarhouses, with names such as J. R. Sloan, who boiled from more than 90,000 taps, Matt and Rex Gillian, the Minors, the Sweets (could you ask for a better name?), Rick Mayotte, Gary Corey (who also made tubing installations), Geoff Corey, four Branon families (a family with a long history of sugarmaking), six Howrigan families (sugarmakers in their sixth generation), the Tiffany brothers, the Dubie family, the Ryan brothers, and the Boisenaults. All were over 10,000 taps and several were over 50,000. Georgia Mountain was the newest entry into the Franklin County pantheon.
The Harrisons owned a sizeable section of Georgia Mountain and had used it primarily for hunting. Over the past few years, since the price of maple syrup had gone up, people were telling Kevin Harrison that he should think about getting into maple. He decided to investigate. Kevin, Marty, and Rick walked through the woods in the fall of 2010 and brought sugarmakers along. They toured sugarhouses and asked questions. One common theme, they noticed, was that everyone talked about adding on.
Marty told me, “Kevin said, ‘If we do it, we’re not going to add on.’ Kevin looked at the figures and decided to go ahead. Kevin makes decisions and we stand by them. He’s made a lot of good decisions.”
They walked the woods, did further planning. In April they poured the foundation for the building, 100 feet long and 50 feet wide. They hired a sugarmaker and logger named Doug Edwards to thin the woods and supervise the tubing installation. They strung mainlines and tubing for 23,000 taps. Doug Edwards told me that the cost of installing tubing was $15 to $20 per tap, including mainlines, which meant a cost during this phase of $345,000, at the low end. They put a similar amount into the sugarhouse and hired a plumber, Nick Lemieux, to oversee the pumps and lines.
“Last April it was just a little goat path,” Marty said.
Marty took me to what he called the tank room, where I climbed a ladder to a platform and where I saw the evidence of what you could do if you had a concrete company at your disposal. Below were six tanks for storing sap or concentrate, each tank with a capacity of 9000 gallons. They looked like small swimming pools. “The first thing we did,” Marty said. “All built in-house, with our mechanics. Like potable water tanks.”
He told me they built another set of
tanks just like these on a hill three miles away, where Kevin Harrison owned another 300 acres of maple woods. “Some of the best maples I’ve ever seen,” Marty said. They built a hunting cabin above the tanks. They ran a set of mainlines over Georgia Mountain, up and over a 500-foot incline, and would use high-powered pumps to pull the sap from those faraway woods to this sugarhouse. That was sugaring with an edge, for sure.
MARTY WAS WAITING for some technicians to arrive from the CDL company to adjust his evaporator, so I went outside to have a look around. It was noon by then, and the temperature was 57°, so warm that I felt I had to take a walk up the road into the sugarbush.
Though no one ever told me this, it seemed that there was something iconic or heroic about owning a mountain or even working on one to make maple syrup. At least it felt that way when I was at Bascom’s or later walked on David Marvin’s mountain and when, on a tour of sugarhouses a year ago, the bus driver stopped so that a young sugarmaker could tell the tale of the mountain he was leasing and had thinned, that he was stringing with tubing and at the bottom of which he would build a new sugarhouse. Maybe it was just my regard of mountains, which I thought had a story within themselves, with their ascents, peaks, and descents, but there seemed to be a kind of special status for the sugarmakers who inhabited mountains. It was like you needed a mountain to do it up right.
The sugarbush on Georgia Mountain was brand new, and clean, as they say, but to my untrained eye it seemed just a little overmanaged. All the ground seemed to have been worked, and the trees that had been removed were plucked from the ground by a mechanical harvester—it was like a haircut too close to the skin, in a way. But I could see the plan. The young maples were mostly in the four- to six-inch category in diameter. The other trees had been removed to give them room to grow. When I had watched George Hodskins at Bascom’s remove hemlock trees from a new lot so as to reduce shade, he told me he was “punching holes in the sky.” It was a bold term. Peter Rhoades used the standard forestry term, saying he was “releasing” trees—I loved this term, in the idea that you made some room above and the chosen trees shot up to inhabit it, filling the space with their crowns. The term had the concept of dignity, of ascension. These woods, I could see, would soon have ferns covering the ground, and the green light of the leaves would be shining down upon them.
The Sugar Season Page 11
