Many of us dread that time of year when the sun slips below the horizon earlier and earlier in New England and the temperatures plunge, leaving the air extra frosty, but in the forests of Vermont, the people who harvest one of Vermont’s biggest exports look forward to freezing cold nights that help the sap from the sugar maples run quickly down the lines the next morning when warmed by the sun and straight to the sugar shacks and the people there waiting to boil it into syrup. 

While most are hibernating under their heated blankets, the folks who work the sugar houses in the woods of Vermont began prepping for the season starting in January, taking up to 6 weeks to ready all the trees needed to produce enough sap to satisfy the syrup needs of the United States. Vermont is responsible for producing over half of the country’s maple syrup. 

One foggy and wet afternoon in early April, I found myself at the door of one of these Sugar House’s, curious of the sweet secrets that lay inside. 

We passed the driveway once, and then almost twice, and then finally found our way to the unmarked driveway and made our way towards the most obvious looking entrance. The people inside looked surprised to see people out and about and to have visitors on such a dreary and dismal day but immediately dropped what they were doing to offer a tour and to tell us all about their syrup. 

The McKnight Family Maple is truly a family run operation, with what seemed like less than 3 adults working there along with the assistance of the owner’s children when they weren’t busy with school and his wife when she wasn’t busy with her job teaching children in a local school. Between them though they manage to tap almost 220,000 sugar maple trees and run through the forest to the small sugar house. 

So many trees are needed because it takes almost 40 gallons of sap to produce just one gallon of syrup and with this many trees, they can yield almost 4 gallons of valuable sap an hour. 

The golden life blood of the maple trees glittered in their giant vats as my friend Sau and I peered down at them, marveling at the sheer size of their containers– massive tanks that could hold thousands of gallons while it ran the sap through various cloth filters until it was pure enough to be boiled down. 

After the tank room, we made our way to the heart of the house and the great machine that turned the golden sap into thick delicious syrup. It sat like a content little dragon, happy to be fed gallon after gallon of sap and fuel while puffing out towers of smoke and spitting great flames. It was enormous and could reach scorching temperatures to be able to boil down the water from the sap as quickly and efficiently as possible. The owner of McKnight’s went over each different step of the boiling down process after the sap had been filtered and described the inner workings of the machine with pride and expertise, answering any questions we had before we made our way to one of the funnest parts of the tour, the tasting portion. 

Here we were shown different kinds of syrup and different maple products, some I had no idea even existed. Their little gift shop corner was a treasure trove of maple flavored delights, an interactive sensory lesson on the things that could be done with maple syrup and even a lovely little display that reflected the presence of a teacher within the family, with a wall of beautifully illustrated children’s books telling tales of maple trees and their magical syrup.

 At the end of our nice little afternoon excursion we packed up Sau’s pick up truck with as much syrup, cartons of maple butter and bottles of their special smoky maple seasoning our budgets and wallets could allow and we made our way home on the slippery wet roads as quickly as we could to crack open some of Vermont’s finest IPA’s and get to grilling up something deliciously seasoned and sweetened with the maple flavored prizes we had adventured to find.