At Thurman Maple Days, farms blend old, new

Even with technological advances, sugar house visitors still want an old-fashioned experience

By Tim Rowland 

Technology has come to the art of maple sugaring, with reverse osmosis doing most of the work once reserved for evaporators, vacuum tubing taking over for spouts and buckets and heat and water being recycled where once they were lost.

These practices increase production and decrease fuel costs, while making it easier to manage miles of blue tubing prone to breaks and nibbling squirrels.

But tourists don’t pack up the SUV on a late winter’s day and trundle over the river and through the woods into the heart of the snowy Adirondacks to see reverse osmosis. So there was still plenty of weathered barn wood and billowing steam on the first weekend of the Thurman Maple Days, which continues as part of state-wide maple weekends through the end of March.

On March 15, usually empty country roads were crowded with people emerging from a cold winter. Visitors were basking in a warm sun, experiencing all things maple, and discovering the area’s rich sugaring history. “People are sick and tired of being cooped up all winter and when they see that steam it’s like a sign of life,” said Ralph Senecal, owner of Valley Road Maple Farm. “That cloud of steam is a big draw.”

‘The Gadget Man’

But you won’t see that cloud just up the road at Candy Mountain Maple Farm. Steam is heat, and to owner Mike Richter heat is useful. Richter is known to friends, family and the tightly knit Thurman maple community as The Gadget Man. He’s argued with people who are unconvinced that he’s making syrup, because they don’t see the signature white plume above his sugar shack. Today, “shack” is universally a relic of the past, although there is no shortage of rough-cut lumber wrapped around gleaming, stainless steel evaporators, whose cost can run well into five digits.

Richter leads tours across a floor made not of boards but of recycled windmill blades, past the evaporator and into the high-tech nerve center of his operation replete with gauges and control panels collecting prodigious amounts of maple-centric data. Joe Groff, a jack of all trades at Valley Road, said the first time he saw it “I asked him what time he was going to launch because I wanted to see how high it would go.”

Related reading: Sipping on sap? Maple producers branch out to tapping other trees

“It’s all science,” said Richter, who has applied his engineering know-how to sugaring, and seems to be having no small degree of fun doing so. Probes and sensors monitor the sap, from the taps to the vacuum tubing that draws it into the sugarhouse to the filtering and evaporation process. He can, for example, tell exactly how much electricity the operation is using at any given time. “Right now it’s drawing 4.3 amps — that’s about the same as a kitchen blender,” he said.

The steam from the evaporator is captured and recycled, Richter said, saving fuel by preheating the sap from a temperature in the 40s to up to 180 degrees.

Evaporators today are only used at the tail end of the process, generating the heat necessary to bring the sap up to 212 to 217 degrees, achieving the Maillard reaction (familiar to chefs as  the crust on a loaf of bread, or the sear on a steak) that gives the syrup its caramel color.

Using reverse osmosis to get the water out

Most of the separation of sugar from water, about 85%, is performed through reverse osmosis, a molecular-level filter that lets water molecules pass, but collects the larger sugar and mineral molecules.

Randy Galusha, owner of Toad Hill Maple Farm, said he made the switch to reverse osmosis when he built a new sugarhouse in 2010. “We had a very large oil-fired evaporator with two large oil burners, burning 25 gallons of oil an hour,” he said. “And with the price of oil at that time, you boil all day long and into the night, and it got expensive.”

At his farm — where his 3,150 taps can in the best of times can produce a half-gallon each — reverse osmosis has had such an impact that the same amount of fuel once needed to produce 25 gallons of syrup now produces 200 gallons. But in maple country, sugaring is as much about entertainment as it is about production.

“When I built my sugar house, I built it with the public in mind; people are impressed by the timber frame and everything,”Galusha said. “I also put a lot of windows in the sugar house so people can see into the kitchen, and they can see from the tank room upstairs down to the evaporator.”

He also switched from oil to wood, on the grounds that it’s more picturesque and action oriented. And on slow days when there’s no sap left to boil, he’ll add plain water to the evaporator to produce the necessary steam. “It’s a very intense process,” Galusha said. “And I think people that aren’t familiar with maple, when they come in and they see it all going on, they’re kind of thrilled by it. It’s kind of a show.”

More flexibility around sap runs

Producers say the tourism aspect is a necessary revenue stream, particularly as the weather gets less dependable. This year was “more like a normal year,” said Senecal at Valley Road. Normal, in that January and February — when in recent years there had been a thaw that would get the sap running —  were ice cold and nonproductive. This means producers will have to hope for ideal weather in March and April to make up for lost time.

In the past, it was critical that warm days be followed by sub-freezing nights. That’s because the cold increases the air pressure inside the tree, forcing the sap to flow out the tap as the temperature warms during the day.

Technology has changed this as well, Senecal said, as vacuum tubing can suck sap out of the tree regardless of air pressure. “We can go four or five days now without a freeze,” he said.

Miles of tubing run through the forests, greatly increasing efficiency over bucket-and tap days. Recent technology has improved the system, as leaks that were once quite difficult to find can be detected and isolated by sensors.

Richter, whose organic maple farm stresses STEM education and sustainability, said the old Currier and Ives version of sugaring was picturesque, but hard on the trees. He displays a board sawn from an old maple that in its time had been poked full of multiple holes for large taps. Dark, deadened wood shows the extent of the damage. Today’s “health taps” are smaller gauge and better for the tree, he said.

Whether old-fashioned or high tech, visitors to Thurman Maple Days were equally enamored. “It’s amazing how technologically advanced it is,” said Chris Mason, who came with his family from Saratoga. “It’s impressive to find all this going on in the Adirondacks.”