Rick Kobik
Transcript
Rick - Ever since I came to Vermont in the early 70’s
I was interested in making maple syrup so I sugared with a man named Colonel
Aires who invented a tool to measure the density called the hydrotherm. He had a farm right across from Route 7 and I sugared
with him. I would just boil outside on a small pan and just get scrap wood and
make a few gallons. Then, I always wanted to have a sap house so I built this
sap house in the late 70’s early 80’s and I got an evaporator. It was a used
evaporator that was all rusty and I rebuilt it and we made a lot of syrup on
that. Let me just explain what an evaporator really is. I have this covered
because I have bats that like to share the sap house with me in the summer
Krista
- So is this (the evaporator) made out of stainless steel?
R – Yeah, everything you see that’s shiny is
stainless steel. It’s basically a big wood stove. This one is twelve feet
long, so you can see everything below this is basically a wood stove and then
these are just pans that sit on top. There are three pans. These are the syrup
pans. These have flat bottoms and this pan is called the flue
pan. It has the bottom which is not flat and it’s got flues in it. It’s shaped kind of like this so the sap can go down
in those flues and the fire can
be in between. And then, this is where you put the wood in here and I have a fan
underneath the evaporator that blows air up through the holes that you see in
those crates so it’s just like a black smith’s bellows you know, like when you pump air into a fire, it just
really heats up. When I’m boiling and the pans have sap in them they’re not
full of sap they have maybe 1inch or 1 ½ inch of sap and you build a fire and
it just boils. The whole time you’re boiling there’s sap coming in. I have
tanks outside and the tank is up high enough so it can come in by gravity and
I’ve taken the float boxes off to clean but sap comes in and it’s regulated
by a float so there’s always sap coming in and it’s coming in as fast as
you’re boiling. All we’re doing is evaporating sap, we’re just evaporating
sap into the air and that’s why we have this steam hood to help send steam out
through the cupola
otherwise it drips on the roof. The steam will go through the
metal roof and then it will just drip and then this is where I take the sap off
so, what it’s doing is it’s coming in and it has to because there’s
dividers throughout this. It comes into one spot, it’s like a channel of sap,
it can only go in one direction and it winds its way through and its getting
thicker and thicker all the time until by the time it gets here it’s syrup so
about every 15-20 minutes I can take off a batch of syrup that’s basically the
process. It’s just a wood fire evaporating sap. There are a lot more technical
outfits than this one. They have these systems called reverse osmosis where you
can pump the sap through a membrane and what it does is it lets the water
through and you can discard that so you have a thicker concentration of sugar in
the sap so you have to boil it less, but I don’t use that.
K
– How long do you boil sap for?
R – It depends how the sap runs that particular
day, but on the average I would gather in the late afternoon, around 2 and then
perhaps start boiling around 5 till about 10 or 11 o’clock.
K
– Where does the sap come in from?
R – I don’t have any sap that comes in directly
to this sap house because we’re on top of a hill. It would be ideal if we were
at the bottom of the hill and all the trees were at the top. So, what I do is
put a tank in the back of my truck and I have a little tubing system throughout
the neighborhood, some on my property, some on other peoples property and then
I’ll either pump into the tank on my truck, in other words everything goes
down to a tank and then from there I pump it into my truck or I have it, you
know sometimes, the tank far up enough that it will come in by gravity. I have
to haul it all up and then dump it into another tank that’s down low and then
I pump it into a higher tank so then it goes into the evaporator but, this is
the tube that leads to the evaporator. Up there (at the top of the tube) it says
top and down there it says bottom, and this is just a gauge to let you know how
much syrup there is inside so when it’s getting close to here (bottom of the
tube) then you know you’re going to run out of sap and you have to always keep
sap when you have the fire going. You have to keep sap in the pans to keep them
from warping. If you let the sap, if you let it get down too low, it could burn
or it will warp the pans.
K
– How many trees do you usually tap?
R – I usually tap about 1200 trees, and for
Bennington County that’s about the average. There are people that have 10,000
– 15,000 taps, so some people have gotten into really big operations. It’s
really a hobby gone wild for me, so it’s not like it’s a big part of my
income at all, it’s just a hobby.
K
– And do you do this by yourself?
R – Well, my wife Greer helps a lot and my son
Todd, he usually helps. I have a nephew Colby and my brother in-law Bill. It’s
kind of a family run operation. People come around, people like to get out at
that time of the year, and it’s March. People like to come out and hang out at
the sap house. Usually we’re boiling and it’s kind of cozy and we’ve got
the fire going and its kind of fun, especially kids love it. My nephew Colby, he
really loves it. Then there are always samples of syrup so they like that part
too.
I’ll
show you over here I have antique spout collection. This is one that perhaps an
early settler in colonial times might have used and what they would do is tap a
pretty large hole in the tree and then let this (the sap) run into a wooden
bucket. I’ll show you what an old bucket is like. They were made out of wood
and they had metal bands on them so in the spring you’d have to keep them
moist. In the summer, they dry out so you’d have to put water in them so they
would swell up so in the spring so they wouldn’t dry out and then you could
hang them out on the tree and this (the spout) would go right there (on the edge
of the bucket) and the spouts have evolved years. This (a smaller wooden spout)
is the smaller, version of this one (the larger wooden spout), and then they
started making them with hooks on them. Here are different kinds of metal spouts
that have evolved. Some of them are from different manufacturers that existed at
the same time and this is the spout we’re using today. This (the 7/16 plastic
spout) was the spout we used about 5 years ago. We have some of these out there,
but this is the 7/16 hole that we drill in the tree and now they call this the
health spout and you’re only drilling a 5/16 hole in the tree. This is better
for the tree and you get about just as much sap from the tree and it’s less
evasive to the tree. These holes (5/16) heal really quickly and these spouts
connect to the tubing which is 5/16 tubing and they connect to a ½ inch or ¾
inch main line and it will go down to the tank so the tubing systems, if you
don’t have a vacuum, which I don’t, they all have to be run downhill. And
you have to make sure there aren’t sags or anything like that. And so this was
the metal tubing system where they had a metal rigid pipe and I don’t know how
long ago they did this, I’d say at least 100 years ago, and they had all these
pipe systems in the woods that were held up by sticks and if the deer broke it
you’d have a lot of work to put it back together. I’d love to see one of
those all set up. At least with the tubing that we have now its flexible so deer
can go underneath it and it doesn’t fall apart. Right now I’ve washed the
tubing and I’m just getting some water from out of the spouts but what I’ll
do is put the spouts on a plug to keep them clean during the summer.
You
can see all the tubing going down hill. I have a tank at the bottom of the hill.
Right here we have about 10-12 cords of wood. Usually I have 7 of these racks
and I have other wood that’s closer by and you can pull the whole rack with a winch
right up to the door on these tracks but, this year, we had a
really bad year. The weather just wasn’t right. I only made about 70% of my
average crop and in the area people only made 50% to 90% of the crop but most
made ½ to 2/3. The weather was really cold and then it warmed up right away.
What we really need for sugaring are cool nights below freezing, say 25 degrees
is really good, and then a warm day, but, not a hot day, like 45 degrees or
upper 40’s is fine, and what its really doing when the tree at night starts to
freeze, it creates a vacuum in the tree and it sucks sap up and then the next
day when the sun comes up it pressurizes the tree so that’s when the sap will
run. The warmth just causes the sap and the cells to expand and it creates
pressure in the tree and then it will run out into either your tubing or your
bucket. We always hang a couple of hundred buckets on the trees where tubing
systems just wouldn’t work, so this year we never really had a good run of
sap. All the set up and clean up is the same no matter if you make 100 gallons
or 300 gallons, so I have some wood left over, that’s a plus. I didn’t use
quite as much, but these are all the racks I used, these four racks. So this
year I’ll be filling the racks up, that’s one of the important things is to
keep the wood dry.
After
I take off the sap from the evaporator right here it has to be filtered and
I’ll bring it over and I have a filter press and usually there’d be a bucket
hanging here. I would dump the sap, and its not sap anymore, its syrup to be
filtered and we’d pump it through a series of papers to get the niter out of
it. Niter is like the limestone that’s in the syrup it just comes up from the
sap from the tree it’s in the water around here too if you boil water around
here you will get a settlement in your tea pot. So you pump into this canner and it has a little propane
heater under there so we heat it up to 180 degrees and then we can can it. We
have some different size containers but right now I’m limited to these maple
glass containers. So on a rainy day it’s a good project
K-
Who do you usually deliver the syrup to? Local people?
R- People come to the door all the time for syrup
and the Chocolate Barn is a good customer, Arlington Inn, they use it in the
kitchen. I bring up a few gallons to them every month, or so just word of mouth.
It just goes. Then there are always the charities, the Shaftsbury 6th
grade raffle. These are samples of the syrup that I take throughout the season
and everyday that we are boiling I take a sample and we put it up there ( on the
windowsill) and this is the first syrup that we made and it was fancy then it
went to a medium amber which is slightly darker than the fancy but it stayed you
can see how constant it was throughout the season it’s a real nice medium
amber syrup and over here towards the end it got darker these actually were not
from what I made this season these (the last two samples on the right) were from
some of my canning projects so you can see that this was really darker and this
was some grade C some cooking syrup that we made at the very end.
K-
What’s the difference between the grades?
R- Well this little thing (a card with grade
information) will describe it. Fancy syrup is very light and its got a very,
very light taste, sugar makers like fancy and they think it has the real maple
taste and it used to be the most prized syrup. People used to love fancy. Fancy
is still more valuable, like if you were going to sell a container of syrup
fancy you’d get more money for fancy then you would for medium amber or dark
amber but medium amber is slightly darker and it just has a slightly stronger
taste. Let’s see how they describe it in the literature “a pronounced maple
loquat characteristic maple flavor popular for table use”. Medium amber is
probably the most popular grade now but, dark amber which has a much stronger
taste has become much more popular than it ever was. It really has a strong
taste and people seem to like it. It really has the dark flavor and this is the
testing kit and you take your sample of syrup and you put it in there (a slot
next to the samples of other grades) then you compare it to the samples that are
in here and it has to be as light or as light as the sample to be considered the
grade. So, if it’s just slightly darker than medium amber but not as dark as
the dark amber still, you have to call it dark amber. It can’t be any darker
than that grade. That’s how we grade it so and there is a little bit of taste
involved too because sometimes you can make a light syrup say it would be a
fancy flavored syrup but, for some reason it just has a stronger taste so,
usually most people would call that a medium amber or a dark amber depending on
how strong the taste is. So, color is the main indicator but taste is still
involved in it. So, that’s how we grade it and all syrup. People usually think
that dark syrup is usually thicker but its all the same. It just seems thicker
because the fancy, when you pour it out, it just looks so light that it looks
like water sometimes but, it’s all the same density and the way that we test
for density is with a hydrometer and we’ll float this. We take the hot syrup
and we float this hydrometer in here and there are these red lines, one for a
hot test, and ones for a cold syrup. So,
when were making this syrup you take it off you put this (the hydrometer) in
there and you want to get that red line right at the liquid level and then this
(the sap) at the perfect density. All this (the hydrometer) does is measure how
thick the liquid is so, and if its not the right thickness it won’t keep and
it wont taste right. If its too thick, it will crystallize in the bottom. I
don’t know if you’ve ever seen little crystals. It almost looks like maple
candy in the bottom of the jar it just means it too thick. Just having a
container too long will cause it to evaporate and thicken up.
K- How long
does it usually last for?
R-Syrup will last a long time. You don’t want in
the sunshine in the container but, if you keep it in a cool spot it will last
almost indefinitely. The best spot to put syrup is in the freezer. If you take a
glass jar like this or any glass jar and keep it full it won’t expand because
we’ve already boiled most of the water out of it. It’s so thick that it
doesn’t expand. You can take it out of the freezer and warm it up on the
microwave or on a stove and it seems funny because usually when you put a liquid
in a freezer it expands but, sap doesn’t. One of the worst things to do is to
take say, a can of syrup and just use a little bit of it and then put it in the
refrigerator for a real long time because, what can happen is some of the metal
can be exposed to the air and you can get a metallic taste but, if you use the
syrup fairly quickly you can keep it in a metal container but, its really better
to put it in glass. It doesn’t pick up any flavors. We can it in both the
metal containers and in these little plastic jugs. People seem to like these
(the plastic jugs). These (the plastic) are handier to use but, people like the
looks of the can better. It is more of an old-fashioned look and also these
(plastic jugs) take up a lot more space on the shelves than the tins so, you can
store a lot more but, with people, they seem to think with traveling and this
and that that these (plastic jugs) are handier to use. They are handier to fill
because they have a big top on them and it’s always a pain when you are using
a can and you daydream or you just can’t see and the syrup runs on the shelves
before you can turn the speed down.
These are some old strainers that I got from Colonel Ayres sometimes in,
there’s sap when its boiling, you might see that a leaf blew in or the foam
was on top and I don’t use these anymore but, I did when I worked with Colonel
Ayres. I think for any sugar makers is just a process that they’ve learned to
love and it’s a lot of work for any amount of money you might get from it.
It’s just like a tradition in Vermont.
This is what we use when we tap the tree nowadays. What we use is a
battery powered drill and the drill bit, let me just grab one of these, the
drill bit that we are using for this spout is this big (5/16) and then for the
normal size spout you can see that’s its this big (7/16) and what we are doing
is, this is a cross-section that we cut of a tree and when you drill in tree
after the season you take that spout back out but, what it does then, the tree
will grow new bark but this does not fill the whole. Like where you drill the
whole, that does not fill up with fluid that just stays there and you can see
here, this was like a old spout and when this was drilled probably about the
outside of the tree was right (points to edge of cross-section) here and what
these things are, these show you what it looks like above or below the whole. In
other words, there’s a staining that occurs above and below where you drill
and then that wood becomes no good for tapping so, you’d never tap if you had
whole and an old spout on the tree you’d never tap directly above it because
you wouldn’t get any sap there. The best thing to do is to move away from
that, you know, use the whole tree over the years to get your sap instead of
saying “Oh, I’m always going to tap on this side.”. You want to move them
around so you can move those wholes around then, this will show you. This is
like a board that was cut out of a tree that had been tapped to show you the
wholes that are still there and then you can see the staining that occurs above
and below. So, this, what we are looking at here is just a shadow of the tap.
There’s a guy in Shaftsbury who makes clocks and he will take a board like
this and he’ll cut it out with a jigsaw like in the shape of VT or some other
shape and put a clock face on it and sugar makers really like it because you can
see the tap wholes and I guess I could show you this. This is an automatic draw
that I have. It used to be that sugar makers would, they’d either take there
ladle something like this and they’d dip it in the syrup and they’d watch
how it would run off and if it ran off, it was too thin but if it would apron
off, that would mean it was thick enough and it was syrup. They also have a
thermometer, and syrup boils at 7 degrees above what water boils at so, say
water boils at 212 degrees sap, will boil at 217 degrees and it changes because
of the barometric pressure. At our altitude it might be different from here than
from Dave Mance down in the village in Shaftsbury. It’s just a difference of
elevation. What we have is a little computer and there’s a probe that goes in
the pan that senses the temperature then, there’s an electronic valve that
attaches here so, I can set the temperature that I want to say, 219, and when
the probe senses the temperature in the pan, the valve will open up and the
syrup will come out automatically. It’s called an automatic draw-off
system so, once you get It all set up for that day, then you don’t have
to be watching the temperature and watching the valve. So, if I have my back
turned and I’m filtering or canning or putting wood in when its syrup that
valve opens up and the syrup comes out. I have a stainless steel pan sitting
here so that saves a lot of time especially when I’m here by myself. That’s
been a really great invention
Generally,
it takes about forty gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup on average.