GUILFORD-Just when so many of us are ready to accept that this Vermont winter will never end, the sap starts running.
At the annual Sugar on Snow Supper at Broad Brook Community Center (BBCC) on March 7, neighbors sat shoulder to shoulder at long community tables passing around the deviled eggs, baked beans, mashed potatoes, dinner rolls, and coleslaw made by Broad Brook Grange members and others in the community. Volunteers — ranging in age from tweens to nearly 90 — served the ham.
This meal, of course, was just a precursor to the reason we all gather for sugar on snow: ultra-locally harvested snow (straight from the backyard of the BBCC) slathered with hot maple syrup boiled down by David Franklin, who has been doing this work for decades.
The maple syrup flows liberally, and tradition dictates we slurp it down with a side of pickles and donuts. This wholesome picture is an annual fundraiser for the Grange and a priceless memory.
In these hilltowns, we pour our syrup on pancakes, waffles, and French toast and enjoy it as candy, slathered on toast, as a healthy-ish replacement for sugar in baked goods, and as a sweetener to savory dishes like squash.
According to the state Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets, state maple farmers produced 3.06 million gallons of maple syrup in 2025. It was a $94 million business in 2024.
We can easily take our maple syrup for granted. Vermonters’ near-cultlike reverence for maple syrup is part of who we are — not only in its consumption but its preparation.
‘The Goldilocks tree’
Like many Vermonters, Sam Schneski moonlights — sometimes literally — with what he calls his “little out-of-control hobby” making maple syrup.
A county forester for the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation, Schneski started his operation in Guilford with 90 buckets and a little backyard evaporator, and his tools haven’t changed all that much.
Maple syrup is maple sap with the water boiled off until it is 66.9% sugar. It takes approximately 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.
Schneski has gotten better and better at it over the years. He now produces around 100 to 125 gallons of syrup every sugaring season and sells it via his small enterprise, Schneski’s Maple & Tree Works LLC. (You can find it at the Brattleboro Food Co-op.)
How is this season going? “The standard answer from most sugarmakers is, ‘I’ll tell you when it’s over,’” he says.
That’s because the sap flows under certain conditions.
“Sugar maples are sometimes referred to as the Goldilocks tree,” Schneski says. “They like things just right — not too hot, not too cold, not too dry, not too wet, but just right.”
He describes the perfect conditions for sugaring, which start the prior summer with “ideal temps” of 75 to 85 degrees and average rainfall, followed by a good, cold winter.
Late winter is the critical time for sap to flow, and it’s best if the days are in the 40s and the nights down in the 20s. But, Schneski adds, “We rarely get that anymore.”
Still, he says, “Sugarmakers are clever people. They were originally all farmers who sugared for their households, so they came from that problem-solving, figure-out-how-to-make-it-work heritage.”
Today’s commercial sugar makers are just as scrappy, and they still care deeply about the quality of their product and take pride in the fact that Vermont is famous worldwide for its maple syrup.
“The changing climate has made us all adapt to tapping on a variable timeframe, as well as dealing with surprise heavy wet snows, ice storms, and days where temperatures spike way above what we used to think of as normal for the time of year,” Schneski says.
Maples are not the only trees you can tap: beech, birch, butternut, sycamore, and walnut are all tappable, but none quite compares to the sugar maple and red maple in terms of sap production and sugar content.
“In Alaska, they make birch syrup, which I’ve only had once,” Schneski says. “That’s just about the right number of times to try birch syrup.”
Vermont’s dominant tree scene is new-growth deciduous hardwood, with generally calcareous (sweet, not acidic) soils that lend themselves perfectly to the growing of sugar maples.
At the mercy of variables
Sugar makers are at the mercy of location, climate, culinary trends, and market conditions. But sugaring is also a matter of devotion and skill.
Does he think of sugaring as more of an art or a science?
“It’s definitely a science,” he says, though he concedes that “once you do it for long enough, it can feel like an art, because you become naturally in tune with the process and how the weather, the trees, and your boiling system work together.”
“But there is no room for creativity that would veer away from the core scientific processes of how trees make sugar and how heat applied at the right time, for the right amount of time, results in pure maple syrup,” he says.
Those standards are mandated by state law and regulated by the state, which stringently enforces density, grade, color, flavor, clarity, sanitation, packaging, and language on the labels, among other aspects of Vermont’s signature crop.
Having so many variables associated with sugaring only adds to the magic of it all.
Real maple syrup is not a given elsewhere. Out West, you can’t expect that what you pour from the pitcher on the diner table will be the good stuff.
“Maple syrup is so common to us here in the Northeast, but most folks in the rest of the country have either never tried it or really need to go out of their way to get some by mail order — or by visiting Vermont,” Schneski says.
To learn more about maple sugaring and maple products in Vermont, visit the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association, whose annual Maple Open House Weekend takes place statewide Saturday and Sunday, March 21 and 22.
This News item by Joslyn McIntyre was written for The Commons.