Twilight of the Sugar Maples

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Of rising sap -- and temperatures -- in the Wisconsin woods

A sharp bit cuts a clean hole. Each year as winter slides toward spring, I head into my family's woods in northern Wisconsin with the best drill bits I can find. I am the fourth generation of my father's family to tap our sugar bush, a hillside grove of 200 sugar maples whose warped limbs interlace high above the forest floor. Together with a few soaring pines, these maples form an enclave partially spared by the loggers who began clearing this area late in the 19th century. Sugar maples grow throughout our woods, but only in the sugar bush are there old, shaggy-barked trees -- trees that might already have been growing here in 1837 when the Ojibwe, who call sugar maple "the man tree," ceded this land to the United States government.

Tapping maples is, in principle, fairly simple: Drill a small hole an inch and a half into the trunk of each tree, insert a spile, and place a container beneath it to catch the drips. On days when the maples are plashy, a good one runs over a gallon of sap, which must be gathered and boiled down to the brink of sugar saturation. Hitting the perfect density is the trickiest part of the process. Stop too soon and the syrup will spoil easily; boil too long and some of the sugar will form rock candy.

Folk methods for telling when syrup is done abound. Some old-timers watch the size of the bubbles rising in the boiling syrup. Others wait for the syrup to "sheet" from a spoon. Most novices track the syrup's boiling point with a candy thermometer and stop cooking when it hits seven degrees above the boiling point of water at their current elevation and barometric pressure. The commercial standard is to measure the syrup's specific gravity with a hydrometer, a glass bulb with a graduated stem that floats in the syrup like a fisherman's pencil bobber. Once the syrup has reached its proper density, all one has to do is filter out the solids that precipitate during the boiling process -- a gritty but innocuous mixture of calcium and magnesium salts referred to as "sugar sand" -- and bottle the finished syrup for storage. Nothing is added; the trees supply all ingredients.

For drilling tapholes, I use a carpenter's brace, a device now most often found in the boxes of old tools at estate sales where, in my part of the country, the objects that gathered around a human life rest together on hay wagons for a few final, obituary hours before being dispersed. A brace is little more than a steel shaft with a rectangular bow in the middle. At one end, jaws and a chuck adjust to receive a drill bit; at the other, a free-spinning mushroom-shaped head transfers pressure from one's hand through the shaft to the bit.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print