Russell Family Sugarhouse

For seven generations this family in town have made maple syrup in the same sugarhouse in the same way:buckets and horses to haul the sap, wood fire to boil the sap.

Note: This story, written a few years ago, remains timeless. It has a slide show and audio.

Every year I sugar. Or, for those who don’t live in Vermont, every year I make maple syrup.

So every year I miss going to the Russell Family Sugarhouse up on the hill behind Lantman’s Market in Hinesburg. I’m too busy — at the same time they are. But not this year. This year I didn’t sugar. Or, rather, I only sugared for a couple of days. The rest of the time, I wandered down to the Russell Family Sugarhouse to see how they do it.

The sugarhouse was built some 150 years ago and rests on a hill on a large tract of land. The family has preserved the land forever and granted access to the public to trails that wind through the woods and fields. The family also farms it. Mind the cattle and watch where you’re stepping.

The family — Howdy and Harry Russell and their partners, Anne Dongan and her “boys” – Joe, James and Kevin – and their partners, Matt Mead and his kids, and other cousins and sons, brothers and daughters, parents and partners and a whole lot of friends tap anywhere from 900 to 1500 trees (depending on who’s available to do the work) the old way. They use metal buckets and collect the sap in a horse-drawn wagon with a large tank and they boil it down using wood. No vacuum tubes or reverse osmosis or fancy oil-fired evaporators for the Russell family.

How many gallons does the tank on the wagon hold? No one is sure. How many gallons does the holding tank in back of the sugarhouse hold? No one is sure. How many taps this year? No one is sure. Wait a minute, here it is, 930. They would have been more but Joe, a dairy farmer, has a new baby in the house. How much wood do they usually burn? Ten cords of four-foot logs split with a special, home-built gas-powered splitter. A cousin built it and hauls it up before the sugaring begins to take care of the huge logs that the family has cut and stacked in a big pile at the bottom of the hill. How many gallons of syrup do they produce? That depends.

An unusual thing: The main sugarer is a woman. Anne Donegan, a Russell by birth. And she has been assisted these last, er, “few” years by Andrea Morgante, a former town selectboard member and the person responsible for helping the Russells preserve their land.

It’s totally a family affair. Anyone’s family. Young mothers and fathers lug their kids up the hill – or, if it’s snowy, pull them up on sleds – to play with the dogs and other kids and to see the horses and smell the steam and, yes, sample a little sweetness.

Don’t imagine this isn’t tough work. Particularly for the horses. So whoever is driving them is careful and pauses often when the load is full and keeps track of whether the two horses — paired only for this yearly occupation and owned by two brothers — are getting overheated.

For Anne and Andrea, the work is hot, strenuous but fun. Labor of love. Storytime. Laughter time. Making sweetness.

This year’s season got off with a bump. Turns out one of the evaporator pans had a 3-inch crack and the sap poured out like a hose. Giroux' Body Shop in town was able to repair it in just two days, and all that sap had to wait in the buckets. Luckily it was cool; sap is as perishable as milk so it doesn’t take to sitting around in the warm weather.

This year’s sugaring season has been unusual. It started a little late and ended a little early with a long stretch of hot weather in between. For the trees to produce sap – or to create a “run” – they need freezing temperatures at night and 40 or more degrees in the day. Sun is good. It’s all about pressure. And physics. Warm attracts cold. (Or does the cold sap, like humans, want to get warmer?) So the tree, as it warms in the day, pulls cooler moisture up through the roots where it picks up the natural sugar in the tree and the sap drips out the taps into the buckets.

Same phenomenon holds true with the boiling. Cool sap flows into the first pan, the “warming” pan, and then flows into the finishing pan where the sap travels through the channels, the cooler being attracted to the warmer. It’s like magic. Sap first boils at 212 degrees, give or take, depending on the altitude and the humidity. It’s syrup when it’s about 219 degrees though its density is what determines whether it’s syrup. There’s a gizmo for that.

The syrup is drawn off from the boiling pan and strained through cloth filters (twice) to take out niter, a naturally occurring, mineral-like substance which tastes and smells like an old sock. The more niter you take out, the better the syrup. The sugar content of the sap varies. The first run usually has the most sugar, takes the least time to boil into syrup and thus is the lightest. And most delicate in flavor. Tourist grade. Sap from the later runs has less sugar, takes longer to boil into syrup so the sugar burns more and the syrups is darker.

Most of us like the darker syrup. It has more flavor. And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?

In sugaring, everything is measured in numbers and time. On a good run, the buckets may fill twice in a day. It takes a couple of hours to get “a good boil” going. It takes a couple of hours for the sap to boil down to the point you can draw off a little syrup. Each tap will give you about 10 gallons of sap in average season; that translates into a quart of syrup per tree. This year was below-average (there is general agreement that there is no such thing as a “bad” sugaring season). This year the Russells put up 930 taps. But they made only 456 quarts of syrup. (For the math challenged: 114 gallons.)

The Russells had hoped for one last boil at the end, but the warm weather was unrelenting (imagine being sad that the weather in Vermont is too warm). So the last boil became a bucket collecting and washing party. It wasn't a party, really, unless you count a party as a time when family and friends get together, eat hard-boiled eggs, tell stories and laugh and work together on something that needs to get done. And, oh yes, sample a little maple syrup.