When February throws you preternaturally warm days in Vermont, you dust off your buckets, clean your spiles, and get to sugaring!
This summer we finally started growing ingredients for our batches on our own farm, Bondegaard. The very first thing we ever brewed with them, in fact, was Fire on Snow, our maple, cinnamon, and chili mead. We used three different peppers specially grown for the batch.
What Fire on Snow didn't get from the farm was the maple syrup! (That, plus the smoked peppers, vanilla, and cinnamon, which came from our friends at Runamok Maple.)
Sugaring season usually starts at the end of February and runs for... awhile. A month or so. We thought there was no way that we'd have a sap run in time.
How wrong we were!
As of today, February 11th, 2023, sap is flowing like a river at Bondegaard.
We are so lucky to have about a dozen century-old maple trees on the farm. If we were a full-on sugaring operation, this would be a literal drop in the bucket, but for our needs, it's plenty. Additionally, we're committed to our net-zero carbon goal, so we don't want to collect any more sap than we can boil with solar-powered induction boilers.
It's the start of the season, so we don't know just how much syrup we'll end up with, but we'll report back in about a month. Additionally, this means that we'll be able to make even more maple syrup meads this year (acerglyns, for you nerds out there).
We also want to give a special thank you to Nora, the Viking Princess, for insisting that we tap our trees this year. She saved up her Hanukkah money specifically to buy her own sugaring buckets, and she was generous enough to lend a few of them to the cause.
One last really important thing about sugaring is... it's really fun. It's so nice to get outside on a bright, warming day in the middle of the winter with the whole family and really enjoy the best of being in Vermont.
If you're thinking about getting into sugaring, but don't know how, the good news is that literally, even a baby can do it.
Check back soon to see what we're brewing with that amazing organic Vermont Maple syrup!
