Vermont industry turns over a new leaf | Sacramento Bee

Sugaring season in northern New England still conjures up romantic images of bearded woodsmen in plaid flannel, hauling metal buckets of fresh sap on horse-drawn sleighs to a creaky old sugarhouse that’s billowing with steam, where a wood-fired oven boils the sap into maple syrup. That’s the notion I always clung to as I drizzled maple syrup on my pancakes – at least until a few week ago.

On a warm, sunny spring day in the sugar bush at Butternut Mountain Farm, as the deep snow began to thaw, there were no buckets or sleighs in sight, and I was the only romantic rube wearing plaid flannel. Here, surrounded by miles of plastic tubes, weaving upward through 900 acres of forestland, owner and founder David Marvin showed me how maple syrup is produced in 2018.

The spider web of tubing connects Butternut Mountain Farm’s more than 20,000 taps in its maple trees. Those taps, with the help of a vacuum system, extract the trees’ sap, sending it winding through the tubing network down to the sugarhouse. “We probably have over 100 miles of tubing,” says Marvin, who has been producing maple syrup since 1972, and whose company now packages and sells more than half of Vermont’s maple syrup. “We can take you on a snowmobile all the way up, if you want to see.”

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As it turns out, I don’t have to take a snowmobile ride. We can view the network of tubing from a desktop monitor inside the warmth of Butternut Mountain’s sugarhouse. The maple workers can even get alerts on their iPhones from sensors inside the tubing designed to detect leaks.

As sap gushes into the sugarhouse, its first stop is to undergo reverse osmosis to extract water, which significantly cuts down the sap’s boiling time, reducing fuel and increasing efficiency. “This machine is taking 2,000 gallons of sap per hour and reducing it by two-thirds,” Marvin says.

Yet, even surrounded by technological advances, Marvin reminds me that maple syrup is a natural, unprocessed, unadulterated product – simply boiled tree sap, the same as it was 100 years ago. “Maple is a bright spot in agriculture,” he says. “It’s healthy, sustainable. You’ll tap the same trees for decades.”

“Wow, this is really running today,” he says, excitedly, as he fills up a cup of fresh sap and hands it to me. “On a good day, this is almost as sweet as Kool-Aid. It’s magical.”

We taste some finished syrup before it’s poured into a metal barrel. Sugarmakers never really know how light or dark the finished sap will be until it’s finally boiled. “Hmm. This is on the darker edge of Amber Rich,” says Marvin, referring to the grading system that classifies syrup as Golden Delicate, Amber Rich, Dark Robust or Very Dark Strong. “It’s got a good maple base, with a little bit of caramel. It’s got such a bouquet. Sometimes, it’s almost as complex as Scotch whisky.”

Marvin added, “Part of the magic of maple is that we don’t know everything. I hope we never do.”

What we do know about maple syrup these days is its huge growth, driven by consumers who are looking for natural sweeteners and moving away from refined sugar and corn syrup. Maple’s advocates also tout it as a source of minerals such as manganese and riboflavin.

In Vermont, the nation’s leading maple-producing state, production has tripled in the past decade, from an average of 600,000 gallons per year in the late 2000s to about 1.8 million per year now. Since 2013, Vermont producers have installed 1.2 million new taps. “Maple is pretty big business in Vermont,” said Amanda Voyer, communications director of the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association, one of the oldest agricultural associations in the nation, founded in 1893. “It used to be more of a cottage industry, a side business. Now people are using it as a real income generator.”

Traditionally, maple was a part of a dairy farmer’s annual work cycle, a source of supplemental income in the early spring. But by the 1970s and 1980s, Vermonters were making less than 300,000 gallons per year. In fact, all the current maple growth is only restoring things to former prominence. In the 1860s, when maple sugar was cheaper than cane sugar, production was much larger than it is today. In the early 20th century, Vermont produced more than 9 million gallons of maple syrup a year.

“The imagery of maple hasn’t really moved out of the 1860s, but the technology has,” said Mark Isselhardt, a maple specialist at the University of Vermont’s Proctor Maple Research Center. Until recently, maple production was limited by how much human labor could be put to work in the snowy woods. But technology is rapidly changing that. “We know you can get more sap out of a tree than is currently typical,” Isselhardt said.

Alongside growing demand and advanced maple technology has been relatively stable prices. That’s mainly thanks to producers in Quebec, who own 70 percent of the international maple market and whose trade federation tightly controls supply and pricing. Those factors have made Vermont’s maple forests attractive to big-money investment from outside corporations.

One of the largest has been the Maple Guild, in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, owned by Sweet Tree Holdings and funded by a private equity firm from Montreal called Fiera Comox that invests heavily in agriculture. The Maple Guild, which began in 2013, owns more maple trees than any single producer in the world, with 400,000 taps over 16,000 acres of forest, and with 1,800 miles of tap lines. “A million taps would be our goal,” said John Campbell, the Maple Guild’s vice president of sales and marketing. Campbell refers to the company’s “tree to table” approach and talks about “disrupting the maple syrup category.”

Disruption might be a few years away, but the Maple Guild’s model, and the number of taps, is unique in Vermont, where the largest companies generally buy syrup from smaller producers. Even a company such as Marvin’s Butternut Mountain Farm, which packages maple syrup for Whole Foods, Walmart and Williams Sonoma, produces only a small portion and acquires most of its supply from a vast network of sugarmakers it has worked with for years. “Four hundred thousand taps! Holy moly!” was Marvin’s response when I told him I had visited the Maple Guild’s plant in Island Pond.

At the Maple Guild, I was given a tour by Jesse Hutchinson, the facility manager. “No one’s tried to create a multimillion-dollar business off maple,” Hutchinson said. “It’s romanticized, but it’s pretty simple. You put a hole in a tree and let it drain the sap, and then cook it.”

However, once the syrup is finished at the Maple Guild, that’s only the beginning. “We take the syrup and use it to make other things,” Hutchinson said. “We’re not treating it only as maple syrup for pancakes. We’re treating it as a sugar that you can do all these beautiful things with.”

Those other “beautiful things” include organic black and green teas sweetened with maple, as well as experiments such as bourbon-barrel-aged maple syrup, and syrups infused with vanilla bean, cinnamon and salted caramel. “In the fall, we’ll make a pumpkin spice,” Campbell said.

Then there’s the Tapt brand maple water, which is water that has been removed from the sap via reverse osmosis, then infused with a touch of syrup and flavors such as grapefruit, blueberry and cranberry-pomegranate. Promoted as hydration that’s low in sugar and high in electrolytes and antioxidants, maple water has been trending as the “next coconut water,” and Tapt has competitors such as Vermont’s Drinkmaple (which markets its maple water as being pure sap tapped directly from the tree). The global marketing research firm Technavio predicts that the demand for maple water will grow 30 percent by 2020, and that tree sap (which includes maple and birch water, as well as cactus and watermelon water) will become a $2 billion industry by 2025.

When the Maple Guild does use the sap to make syrup, it even goes about it nontraditionally, using a steam-based technique that converts the sap at a lower temperature (called “steam-crafting,” a trademarked term). The Maple Guild says that creates a purer, less-cooked syrup. The Maple Guild makes only the lightest syrup, graded as Golden Delicate.

Some of us, however, enjoy our maple on the darker, more robust end of the grading scale. I happen to love the deep, dark syrups that used to be called Grade B. In fact, that whole maple syrup grading system changed in 2015: Fancy became Golden Delicate; Medium or Dark Amber became Amber Rich; Grade B became Dark Robust; Grade C became Very Dark Strong; all four are now Grade A.