At this time of year, New Hampshire’s historic maple syrup farms get all the attention, but as soon as the sap starts flowing, anyone with the right equipment and a little knowledge can tap trees and take advantage of a springtime tradition.
Not necessarily a financial advantage, however.
“They come in and say, ‘It only cost me $200 to make a gallon of syrup!’ ” joked Mike Moore, third-generation owner of Sunnyside Maples in Loudon.
But that’s fine with them, he adds.
“It’s a hobby, a winter hobby,” he said. “How much does it cost to buy (skiing) lift tickets — lift tickets for a family of four? Or a snowmobile? … This way you get syrup. Everybody likes syrup.”
About 350 sugar shacks sell syrup commercially in the state, according to the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association, but nobody has any idea of how many people boil down sap in their backyard for personal consumption, since no license is required. But there are a lot.
“Every year, there’s always a handful of new ones who come in, want to try it,” Moore said.
Sunnyside Maples was started by Moore’s grandfather, Lauris Moore, across the street from wetlands that are now the site of the New Hampshire Motor Speedway. (“My dad used to fish for pickerel there,” Moore said.)
Right from the start, it also sold equipment for others to boil down maple sap into New England’s favorite sweetener.
Over the decades thousands of customers, maybe tens of thousands, have bought equipment from evaporators to taps to tubing to jugs. Some do it to make syrup for personal use and some for their own sugar business.
Jason Huckins of Huckins Maple Farm in Northfield, N.H., is among the latter.
“I’ve been making syrup for 26 years. And I’ve been getting stuff from Mike and Sunnyside for all that,” he said.
With close to 200 taps drilled into trees to collect the sap running through the tree’s phloem, Huckins is midsize for a commercial farm in New Hampshire. Some New Hampshire sugar farms have thousands of taps; at the extreme end is Sweet Tree Holdings in Vermont, the biggest producer in a state that leads the country for maple production by a long shot, which regularly oversees more than 450,000 taps.
Backyard syrup makers, of course, are a lot smaller. Moore said he has plenty of customers with a few dozen taps, who boil down 40 to 50 gallons of sap to produce each gallon of syrup for their family and friends.
Moore said the business of supplying backyard producers makes up more than half of Sunnyside Maples’ sales, and has been growing steadily for years. It really took off during the recession of 2008, apparently from people thinking they might turn it into a side business, he said. The pandemic didn’t seem to draw an unusually large number of new customers but it also didn’t scare any away.
“It keeps going up every year,” he said.
It is possible to do backyard syruping on the cheap if you do everything by hand and burn your own wood. (Although Moore notes that “free wood isn’t free” once you count the cost of equipment and time.) A few taps and food-grade buckets are all that’s really needed; boiling can be done in a repurposed stainless steel sink, although that’s a good way to ruin the sap since very careful temperature control is needed.
Getting a real evaporator costs $1,000 or more — and that’s before the recent run-up in costs fueled by the pandemic and snarled supply chains.
A 4-by-8 sheet of stainless steel that once cost $65 might run close to $300, according to Moore.
Still, he doesn’t expect that will turn many people off from the pastime.
“Once you’re bit by the bug you can’t shake it,” Moore said.