Sugarmaking season is just a window of several weeks in Vermont — the time in late winter when nature provides the sunny, warmer days and freezing nights ideal for tapping maples.
But the short season is not a problem for Vermont Evaporator, the Montpelier company that makes a portable outdoor unit that small-scale home sugarmakers can use to boil sap.
That’s because Kate Whelley McCabe, CEO of the evaporator company, has found a market as far south as Alabama and as far away as Alaska and Europe where other makers of syrup also have need of a handy wood-fired boiler.
McCabe has sold evaporators to customers in North Carolina and Tennessee who make black walnut syrup, and to a distillery in New York that makes a black walnut bourbon. She has a customer in Alabama who makes sorghum syrup from sweetgrass, and others in Washington and Oregon who make maple syrup from the Norway and red maples that thrive in the Pacific Northwest.
In researching the rest of the planet to see who is making syrup from what, she’s turned up a plethora of other ways that people soak, mash, or otherwise preserve the nutrients of substances around them. People are making elderberry syrup and even syrup from spruce tips in Alaska and Canada, as they have for centuries.
The strong consumer preference for local food means that the adventurous everywhere are venturing into the woods to make their own syrups, just as home beer brewers started to do decades ago.
“Birch syrups are the hottest new thing,” said McCabe, who went into business making the evaporators in 2015. “You can tap a birch and boil that sap down and it tastes different to different people. To me, it tastes like a sweet balsamic vinegar.”
Ten maples
It’s not easy to boil down sap to make syrup on a very small scale. While the concept and the equipment are both simple — all you really need is pans and a stove — the outlay of heat is prohibitively expensive, and the kitchen is a less-than-ideal place to reduce the 98% of sap that is water.
As writer Rink Mann put it in Mother Earth News, it’s a very steamy task.
“And, when things finally do clear, you’re apt to find the wallpaper lying on the floor,” Mann wrote. “Then, too, even if the batch doesn’t boil over, which it can, the sugar spray from all that furious boiling gets all over the stove and is harder than blazes to get off. So, if you want to maintain a measure of domestic tranquility, it’s best to do your boiling — most of it anyway — outside, or in a handy garage or shed.”
McCabe’s business got its start after she and her husband decided to tap about 10 maples in the yard of their Montpelier home. They boiled the sap down in a turkey pan, steaming up their house. They spent a fortune on propane.
“But it tasted really good, so the next year, we were like, ‘Let’s try this again,’” said McCabe, who described her husband, an engineer and lawyer, as a “serial hobbyist.” When they looked for a small wood-fired evaporator that they could use outside, they found the options to be too expensive or designed for indoor use, McCabe said. So they built their own from a steel drum.
On the run from the law
McCabe, also a lawyer, happened to be looking for a new profession at the time, one that would be less emotionally draining than law; that would enable her to spend more time with the couple’s two children; and that would allow her to be in charge.
“I learned in my legal practice that I prefer to answer to no one,” she said. “I am happy to answer to my customers, but I run the show and enjoy that, and I like making my own decisions and mistakes and learning from them.”
In the first year, one of the big mistakes was purchasing used 55-gallon steel drums and believing sellers who said they had only been used to store vegetable oil.
“We learned a couple of things as we went,” she said. One of them: “People aren’t always honest with you about what was in the barrel when you buy it. We had one incident where we had to contact the state to find out how to safely dispose of something.”
Now they special order new barrels from a company in Maine. The barrels are cut open to hold an evaporating pan, bent into shape and mounted on a frame to create a device that weighs about 90 pounds. In the Montpelier shop, the drums are painted, and McCabe assembles and packages the units for sale. She also blogs about syrup-making and travels to gatherings such as the annual Common Ground Fair in Maine and the Mother Earth News Fair in Pennsylvania to sell the evaporators, which cost a little over $1,000. Her brother, who moved to Vermont recently to work remotely for NASA, also pitches in with assembly and other duties as needed. She has three other employees as well.
Vermont Evaporator has sold about 500 of the devices and expanded its leased space in 2017 to accommodate its growth. The company raised about $30,000 through Milk Money, a Vermont company that connects investors and businesses, in 2016 and another $10,000 from friends and family.
The company sells its evaporators online only now, but this year, as sugaring season approaches in the Northeast, McCabe is trying hard to get a contract with Massachusetts-based Aubuchon Hardware, which has more than 100 stores in the Northeast. She’s also reaching out to retailers like Agway and Gardener’s Supply, and to the many other local markets where the evaporator might come in handy.
McCabe said she has no interest in approaching Home Depot, one of the largest home supply retailers in the world.
“I don’t trust Home Depot; I don’t trust that I’ll be treated well and be able to hack it in that size world,” said McCabe. “I know that because of people I have talked to who have tried to make it in that world.”
McCabe said her company is selling 100 to 200 units a year now, about half to buyers in Vermont. For some people — such as customers in North Carolina who were tapping trees at Christmas — the sugaring season has already started.
While Quebec has a huge maple sugaring culture, McCabe said shipping evaporators over the border is difficult and expensive, so she generally only makes sales to Canadians who drive down to pick up their purchase.
The Vermont Evaporator model, called The Sapling, converts in the off-season to be used as a wood-fired grill, a smoker or a pizza oven. It’s one of many in a crowded market; the companies that make equipment for the very largest sugarmakers also make hobbyist versions. Vermont is also home to the Swanton-based Leader Evaporator, which bills itself as the largest maker of maple sugaring equipment in the world. Leader makes a small model for home use.
Equipment for home sugarmakers is proliferating as people try their hand at making their own syrup. Mark Isselhardt, the maple specialist with the University of Vermont extension, said he has noticed that through his own work with sugarmakers.
“There is definitely interest; there is more equipment available,” Isselhardt said – including small reverse osmosis units that cost $200 or $300.
That competition is the reason why McCabe also blogs, and why the company aims to keep its unit as inexpensive and uncomplicated as possible. While she’s pursuing buyers in all of the syrup markets, McCabe said maple is where it’s at right now.
“The market for 100% pure maple syrup is exploding,” she said, noting that companies are increasingly using maple to flavor food and beverages. “It’s health consciousness, it’s sourcing local, and it’s natural.”
“I like to tell people that backyard sugaring is the new backyard chickens.”
