David Raney, professor of history, refuses to eat store-bought syrup. He’s grown accustomed to syrup that originated in his own backyard, boiled down from the sap of maple trees.
“Whatever flavoring they use in store-bought syrup bears no resemblance. The flavor is off … It’s thicker, gooey, and inconsistent,” Raney said.
Raney hasn’t collected sap from his own trees for several years, but he did introduce Professor of Politics Ronald Pestritto to the idea while they were out hunting together a couple years ago.
“I wonder if this is the kind of thing I could do on my own property,” Pestritto said.
“Sure, absolutely! It’s a lot of fun and very rewarding, but demanding on your time and often on your energy,” Raney said, assuring Pestritto it was certainly a feasible operation for Pestritto’s primarily-wooded 25 acres.
Some weeks later, Pestritto invited Raney to walk through the woods of his own property to identify the best maple trees for tapping, and in 2016, Pestritto started tapping trees.
Pestritto begins the process in late winter, when the temperatures freeze each night but rise to mid-40s during the day. It’s the thawing effect that creates the best sap. If the temperatures don’t freeze at night, the prolonged thaw will result in an off-flavor of the syrup.
Spotting maple trees is easy, Pestritto said, but finding the maple trees that produce the most sap can be a challenge.
“It’s a science, but it’s definitely an art too,” Raney said. “There are a lot of variables that go into just how much sap a tree will produce.”
As he prepared to tap trees last year, Pestritto often brought leaves and bark to Professor of Biology Ranessa Cooper, who would then help him identify the best sap producers.
“I was never very good at biology in school, but I’ve learned more about botany than I ever thought I would learn,” Pestritto said. “We’re very conservative because we want good sugar producers. We don’t want to adversely affect the health of smaller trees, and right now we’ve got all the sap we can handle.”
Even after finding the best sap-producing sugar maples, the Pestrittos use 160 taps on about 100 trees — and still don’t end up with that much syrup. The best sugar maples have only about 2 percent sugar content in the sap, which means 40 gallons of sap will only make a single gallon of syrup.
During peak season, all but the oldest and youngest of Pestritto’s eight children routinely wake up early to begin collecting sap. The oldest, sophomore Anthony Pestritto, usually takes the sap to the boiler later in the morning or at night, but he occasionally helps collect it as well.
“It’s a crisp, fresh feeling,” Anthony Pestritto said. “You’re moving around and the sap is very cold, very clear. It’s enjoyable to be out. Most of the time it’s not too cold. Hopefully it’s not raining. Hopefully it’s not a massive, soggy, muddy mess, but especially if it froze the night before, everything is crisp and clear. It’s very refreshing.”
The Pestritto family usually collects the day’s sap within an hour. They all go out together on a tractor, park the tractor near a grove of sugar maples, and empty the blue bags from the trees into buckets on the tractor. Once they’ve collected from about half the taps, they take buckets of sap back to the garage to empty into a large container on a trailer.
Half of the family stays to transfer the sap from the buckets to the container while the rest go out to finish collecting.
“It’s just a fun thing to do,” Ronald Pestritto said. “It’s at that time of year, late February into early April, where spring’s not here yet, but people are tired of winter and are starting to go stir crazy. This is an activity that gets you outside, and all the kids are involved in an activity together. It’s unusual to find something like that.”
Once the Pestrittos have collected, they deliver the large container of sap down the street to a man who boils it.
The sap is clear and looks just like water, but the sugar concentrate requires it to be treated like a perishable item; it must be covered, and the container must be cleaned after being emptied.
While Ronald Pestritto and Raney both said they enjoyed collecting, boiling sap is a much bigger process.
“Like any hobby, people get into it and really go crazy. We don’t have time for that,” Ronald Pestritto said.
There’s a fine line between sap boiled not long enough versus sap boiled too long, and over- or under-boiling could result in bad syrup.
“Other than consuming it, the most interesting part is the boiling of the sap to produce syrup because it does require attention to detail, finesse,” Raney said.
Boilers typically have many people delivering sap to them, and they set up creative, artistic means to boil the sap down.
“Everyone has their own unique setup, and they’re very proud of that, and they’ll show you that,” Ronald Pestritto said. “The days sap runs, they could be up all night boiling it.”
While Anthony Pestritto said his family theoretically could just throw the sap into a pot and boil it off, it would take several hours, especially with the large amount of sap they collect.
“The boilers have methods. They don’t just stick it in the pot and boil it off. They boil it off at just the right temperature, move it along at just the right speed,” Anthony Pestritto said.
After collecting every morning for several weeks last spring, the Pestrittos only ended with 6-8 gallons of the syrup. It was a low year for sap, but Ronald Pestritto said it was plenty for his family to consume and give away.
“It’s neat that we’re getting the syrup from our own trees,” Anthony Pestritto said. “There’s something about that. I wouldn’t call it work. It’s cold and sometimes it’s wet and miserable, but there’s a lot of times when you’re just out in the woods collecting sap, and that’s nice.”