Read Online The Sugar Season by Douglas Whynott - Free Book Online
Authors: Douglas Whynott
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talking to Kevin at the evaporator, but there always was too much noise, and his voice was too soft to follow over the kaleidoscopic sound. But at intervals, twenty-five feet away in another room by the filter presses as he poured syrup from a hose into a fifty-five-gallon drum, you could hear Kevin talk. He was experiencing the pleasure of the harvest there.
I said to him once, “Some people work all year to get two hundred gallons. It’s like you’re flying the Concorde and they are in little Cessnas.”
“It’s like flying the Concorde with one person,” he said with a burry laugh.
B OILING HAD COME a long way over the last 400 years. Native Americans boiled sap in hollowed-out logs, into which theyplaced hot rocks—they made great quantities of sugar this way. European settlers used iron kettles, a single kettle to which they added fresh sap to the thickening, blackening syrup. Sometimes they used two or three kettles heated over an open fire, with sugar solutions of different stages in each kettle. In the mid-1800s sugarmakers began to use flat pans, rectangular and as much as six feet long, boiling the sap over a stone or brick fireplace—an arch, this fireplace was called. Remnants of those stone or brick arches can be found in the woods today, sometimes even in places where maples no longer stand.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century modern evaporators were developed, with metal fireboxes, also called arches, with two pans on top. One pan was for rapid boiling, the other for finishing syrup. Eventually the boiling pan developed so as to be fluted with deep troughs so as to have more surface area to transmit heat. As the sap boiled and thickened, it was transferred from the flue pan to the syrup pan.
In the syrup pan the thickening syrup moved along by means of a density gradient, the peculiar principle in which thinner syrup pushed thicker syrup ahead. At the final stage, when the syrup was at a density of two-thirds sugar, it was then “taken off,” strained, and filtered.
The fuel for the fire was wood. Generally a sugarmaker could produce a few gallons of syrup per hour, depending on the size of the evaporator, the sugar content of the sap, the properties of the wood, and the skill and effort of the person feeding the fire.
A researcher at the University of Vermont devised a formula known as the “Rule of 86” to determine how manygallons of sap needed to be boiled to make a gallon of maple syrup. The principle was mysterious and simple: if the sap was at one percent sugar content, it took 86 gallons to make a gallon of syrup. But by doubling the sugar content to two percent, the work on the other end was essentially halved, now taking 43 gallons of sap at two percent sugar content to make a gallon of syrup. I found it interesting to multiply the work out—a crop of 1000 gallons of syrup made from two percent sap (often the normal content) would require the boiling of 43,000 gallons of sap. The Bascom crop of about 24,000 gallons would necessitate the boiling of 1,032,000 gallons of sap. Though what they do is actually processing.
When Kevin Bascom came to work on the farm in 1979 Bascom’s had about 30,000 taps on tubing. Bruce had been developing the system for six years. Ken Bascom was well ahead of most sugarmakers because he was boiling by using steam in pipes under high pressure. By 1979 Ken had added to his sugarhouse two oil-fired evaporators that did the bulk of the boiling, feeding reduced sap to the steam-powered evaporator that then finished syrup quickly.
The cost of making syrup increased suddenly during the fuel crisis of 1973 and 1974, when the price of oil quadrupled. Ken had used oil because it was relatively inexpensive and reduced the labor of cutting wood. At that time Ken was burning about four gallons of oil to make a gallon of syrup. That cost was feasible when oil was 25 to 40 cents a gallon, but not at $1.60.
The fuel crisis intensified efforts to make the
I said to him once, “Some people work all year to get two hundred gallons. It’s like you’re flying the Concorde and they are in little Cessnas.”
“It’s like flying the Concorde with one person,” he said with a burry laugh.
B OILING HAD COME a long way over the last 400 years. Native Americans boiled sap in hollowed-out logs, into which theyplaced hot rocks—they made great quantities of sugar this way. European settlers used iron kettles, a single kettle to which they added fresh sap to the thickening, blackening syrup. Sometimes they used two or three kettles heated over an open fire, with sugar solutions of different stages in each kettle. In the mid-1800s sugarmakers began to use flat pans, rectangular and as much as six feet long, boiling the sap over a stone or brick fireplace—an arch, this fireplace was called. Remnants of those stone or brick arches can be found in the woods today, sometimes even in places where maples no longer stand.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century modern evaporators were developed, with metal fireboxes, also called arches, with two pans on top. One pan was for rapid boiling, the other for finishing syrup. Eventually the boiling pan developed so as to be fluted with deep troughs so as to have more surface area to transmit heat. As the sap boiled and thickened, it was transferred from the flue pan to the syrup pan.
In the syrup pan the thickening syrup moved along by means of a density gradient, the peculiar principle in which thinner syrup pushed thicker syrup ahead. At the final stage, when the syrup was at a density of two-thirds sugar, it was then “taken off,” strained, and filtered.
The fuel for the fire was wood. Generally a sugarmaker could produce a few gallons of syrup per hour, depending on the size of the evaporator, the sugar content of the sap, the properties of the wood, and the skill and effort of the person feeding the fire.
A researcher at the University of Vermont devised a formula known as the “Rule of 86” to determine how manygallons of sap needed to be boiled to make a gallon of maple syrup. The principle was mysterious and simple: if the sap was at one percent sugar content, it took 86 gallons to make a gallon of syrup. But by doubling the sugar content to two percent, the work on the other end was essentially halved, now taking 43 gallons of sap at two percent sugar content to make a gallon of syrup. I found it interesting to multiply the work out—a crop of 1000 gallons of syrup made from two percent sap (often the normal content) would require the boiling of 43,000 gallons of sap. The Bascom crop of about 24,000 gallons would necessitate the boiling of 1,032,000 gallons of sap. Though what they do is actually processing.
When Kevin Bascom came to work on the farm in 1979 Bascom’s had about 30,000 taps on tubing. Bruce had been developing the system for six years. Ken Bascom was well ahead of most sugarmakers because he was boiling by using steam in pipes under high pressure. By 1979 Ken had added to his sugarhouse two oil-fired evaporators that did the bulk of the boiling, feeding reduced sap to the steam-powered evaporator that then finished syrup quickly.
The cost of making syrup increased suddenly during the fuel crisis of 1973 and 1974, when the price of oil quadrupled. Ken had used oil because it was relatively inexpensive and reduced the labor of cutting wood. At that time Ken was burning about four gallons of oil to make a gallon of syrup. That cost was feasible when oil was 25 to 40 cents a gallon, but not at $1.60.
The fuel crisis intensified efforts to make the
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