Mead Reached New Record for Maple Syrup Production
By Bob Bumcrot

Drivers on Route 44 can stop by Terry Anstett’s sugar house to buy the real thing.

Winter Mead made 1,260 gallons of maple syrup this year, his first ever four-digit yield, at
his sugar house near Yale Farm in North Canaan. He attributes the large production to a
combination of good weather and improved technology.
Good sap flow requires freezing nights, which causes water uptake from the soil by the
sugar maples, followed by warm days, which causes stem pressure to drive up the sap.
Except in the case of cottage-scale production, taps and buckets have been replaced by a
system of plastic tubes directly connected to small holes bored into the xylem layer of the
mature trees. A healthy sugar maple can produce about ten gallons of sap in a season.
While the flow through the tubes is driven mainly by gravity, the use of a partial vacuum
system has enabled increased production.
Once in the sugar house tanks, the process of removing water from the sap begins. About
39 gallons of water must be extracted from 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.
Traditionally, this was done by boiling the sap in a wood-fired evaporation pan. Starting in
the 1970s, larger operations began processing sap by reverse osmosis, in which the sap is
forced through a membrane that extracts 75 percent of the water. Then the boiling begins,
with steam escaping through the louvered ceiling of the sugar house.
Canada produces most of the world's maple syrup, about seven million gallons per year.
Quebec accounts for 75 percent of the world’s production and other Canadian provinces
for another five percent. In the United States, Vermont makes 450,000 gallons, while New
York and Maine each contribute half that amount. Connecticut is one of seven states that
produce marketable quantities of maple syrup, although less than 100,000 gallons a year.
Aside from Mead and Terry Anstett, the other syrup producers in Norfolk fall into the
cottage-scale class. Bob Bachman tapped 100 trees for 40 gallons, Ed Machowski installed
around forty taps and produced eleven gallons and Zach Holcomb made 40 gallons of
syrup from 150 taps.
Charlie Tirrell used 50 taps. He boiled in his garage and finished the process in two-gallon
batches on his kitchen stove. When someone suggested that it sounded like fun, he
responded, “Define fun. Those buckets get heavy. When I got eight gallons, enough for
family use, I pulled the taps.”