The winter warm spell has maple sap running in some parts of the state — and syrup makers are on the go too,as they to try to capture an early taste of spring.
But some producers worry that the season could be short.
Pat Mitchell and his brother Rick have been tapping maple trees on their Carrabassett Valley land for three decades. They call themselves hobbyists, with fewer than 100 taps to manage.
This weekend they were in a bit of a rush to tap trees and run tubing to take advantage of the prime, if unexpectedly early, sugaring weather.
“This is kind of like a hurry-up job,” Pat says. With forecasts in the mid-40s for Tuesday, he says, “It’s going to flow hard.”
“And we want to catch it,” Rick says. “We don’t want to be drilling and having it just squirt at us.”
The Mitchell brothers may have been caught a bit by surprise by the sudden sap run. But according to Kathryn Hopkins, a maple syrup expert at the University of Maine extension center, it has pretty much always been thus.
“The seasons have been… eclectic lately,” she says. “They’ve been kind of all over the place — starting early, and last year it was actually very late, and if you go back through the record you can find early and late starts throughout history.”
Reports of early sap runs, and even some farmers starting to boil it down to its precious end, are sporadic in the state and region at this point. But Hopkins says she expects more sap to flow and boilers to fire up as the week wears on.
So does Arnold Coombs, an executive at Vermont-based Coombs Family Farms, which ships millions of gallons of syrup from throughout the northeast and Canada, including Maine. He says some of his largest New England suppliers may be making use of a short sap run now to start up their vacuum pumps and identify any weak points in their webs of taps and tubes.
Coombs is worried, though, that this early warming trend could be a sign of things to come, as happened in 2012.
“Back then we had a warm spell in the middle of March where we had 60 and 70 degree weather that effectively ended the season and gave us a short crop,” he says. “So I’m hoping that does not repeat.”
Pat Mitchell says syrup makers would do well to take advantage if the weather produces a few more nights below freezing and days well above, because that early run? It’s the best run.
“The early run is your fancy syrup,” he says. “And if you wait too long, you miss that early run, you lose your fancy syrup. That’s the yellowish… but it’s very sweet.”
Sweet indeed, but the market is increasingly being driven by darker syrup — which has a stronger flavor that can stand up to cooking — as Americans seek out substitutes for refined sugar to sweeten their day.
Last year’s crop was the second largest on record in the U.S., and producers hope this could rival it, if the weather’s right.