A tenth of a degree makes a difference when it comes to the taste and texture of his award-winning maple cream, just ask maple maker Keith Bardwell of Brookledge Sugarhouse in Whately. And Howard Boyden of Boyden Brothers Maple in Conway can tell when syrup is ready to cool just by reading the bubbles.
With nearly a lifetime of sticky tricks for syrup up their sleeves, the maple masters returned from the North American Maple Syrup Council’s annual contest at the end of October with a trove of sweet awards for their sticky products.
Bardwell’s maple cream took first place in the category, and Jeanne Boyden, Howard Boyden’s wife and partner in maple products, won first place for her maple candy and secured a spot in the Maple Hall of Fame at the International Maple Museum Centre in Croghan, New York.
“We are so incredibly humbled, and we do feel that it is the absolute biggest honor, because it comes from our peers. This isn’t the outside looking in, this is from the inside looking around,” Howard Boyden said, adding that other maple producers pick the winners. Grinning in their candy kitchen sitting across from his wife Jeanne, he added, “I am so proud to be married to a hall-of-famer.”
Syrup science
With nearly a lifetime of making maple products under Bardwell and Howard Boyden’s belts, Brookledge Sugarhouse and Boyden Brothers have maple syrup down to a science.
Howard Boyden partly traced the success of so many Franklin County maple businesses to the precise mineral mixture in the area’s soil that carmalizes into a sweet maple treat.
“This all starts with really good sap,” Howard Boyden said. “A lot of it has to do with where we are.”
But the sap has a long journey ahead to the shelf. When the sap trickles from the maple trees in Bardwell’s backyard, he said it only contains 2% sugar.
“If I put a cup of sap on the counter and a cup of water side by side, you’re not going to tell the difference,” Bardwell said.
Once the sap flows from the trees into tubes for Bardwell or buckets for the Boydens, they filter the sap to remove the solids, dropping it into a reverse osmosis system that only allows water to pass through, leaving behind the sweet concentrated sap. Bardwell said his system removes 80% of the water from the sap before it even heads to the boiler.
Next, the sap is poured into an evaporator, Howard Boyden’s favorite part.
“It’s so cool to watch the transformation,” the retired engineer said.
Instead of a pot, the sap boils as it travels through a winding track to ensure every drop heats evenly. The Boydens and Bardwell stressed that the sap must not simmer. Instead, the Boydens’ evaporator heats sap from 35 degrees to boiling in seconds.
The duration of the boiling depends on the maple product. Maple sugar heats the longest until the water completely evaporates, followed by candy, maple cream and then syrup.
“It’s very important to be consistent and know where your sweet spot is and know how many degrees over the boiling point of water to go,” said Bardwell, sitting in his kitchen as his fiancée Anita Buchiane packaged maple nuts. “If there’s anything that I will keep to myself, it’s the temperature over the boiling point; that’s my trade secret.”
Next, the creation must cool to room temperature before filtering the sap again to clear its cloudy look and smoothen the syrup. For maple cream, the creamy form of maple that slides across a knife or spoon, a paddle or gear machine is needed to stir the sap into its smoother maple cousin before sealing the concoction in a bottle.
‘A sense of accomplishment’
In the Boyden Brothers’ candy kitchen where they sell maple syrup, cream, candy and sugar, 12 bottles of syrup sit on a shelf by the door, a spectrum of warm browns from light amber to gold to chestnut. According to Howard Boyden, with the range of colors comes a range of flavors throughout the sugaring season.
“Earlier in the season, you make much lighter syrup because it’s mostly sucrose and that’s all that comes out of the tree is sucrose, water and minerals,” Howard Boyden said. “As the season warms up, days are longer and whatnot, bacteria begins to grow in that sap because of exposure, it starts feeding on the sucrose breaking it down into dextrose and fructose. That, when you boil it, caramelizes differently and gives you a darker flavor and color. It’s total science.”
Bardwell concocts his maple cream with the “golden or very high amber” sap.
“You can make maple cream with different grades, but ultimately, my belief is it’s the flavor,” he explained. “I sometimes think about if I was blind and not seeing what I’m eating, the only thing that’s going to matter to [me] is taste … I’m not trying to make the lightest maple cream in the world, I’m trying to make the best flavor and also the texture.”
He described the maple cream gliding on the palette, noting that no chewing is necessary.
Jeanne Boyden prefers to fill her candy molds with the light amber sap, concentrating a subtler flavor.
“Everybody makes candy out of different stuff,” Jeanne Boyden said before her husband of 43 years chimed in, “You want the science, Jeanne?”
“In a minute, okay?” she replied with a grin before continuing.
The couple met after Jeanne Boyden moved from Holbrook to attend the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They married 43 years ago, but were sugaring long before that, Howard Boyden said, recalling an early memory when he left Jeanne with his grandmother. That was the first time Jeanne both made maple candy and met the grandmother of her boyfriend.
“It grows on you, especially when you’re making really good syrup, between the smell and the taste,” Jeanne Boyden said. “It’s a sense of accomplishment.”
Sticking together
For Howard Boyden, a fourth-generation maple maker on his family’s farm, sugaring “was just something you do.”
In the late 1800s, Howard Boyden’s great-grandfather tapped a maple tree and boiled the sweet sap into solid “maple sugar cakes” with wooden molds. When cane sugar spread through Conway, Howard Boyden’s father decided to boil the sap into the family’s first fateful bottle of maple syrup instead.
“So the truth is, it’s in my veins, I can’t help it, I’ll be making syrup,” Howard Boyden said.
Bardwell first turned sap into syrup at 10 years old with his neighbor, inspired by the maple producer that had tapped trees in his backyard, across the street from his sugar house now. Since creating his first drop of homemade syrup, Bardwell kept tapping trees, spending school vacations in the woods and over the stove. His spirit for sap stuck.
“We in the business like to say we got hooked by the maple bug,” Bardwell said, smiling.
With so many steps and sticky science, the retired highway superintendent said his passion is not an easy one.
“Maple syrup is a labor of love,” Bardwell said. “If you look at it as a job, it’s not for you, you’re not going to have fun.”
Bardwell and Howard Boyden have sugared for so long they both “can read the bubbles in the pan,” as Howard Boyden described, sleeves full of sticky tricks.
When Bardwell hears spring peepers or spots moths in his woods, he knows the end of sugaring season is around the corner. When the Boydens weigh one gallon of their syrup, they know the balance must read 11.5 pounds. When “you wrap your hands around the tree and your fingers touch, one tap is all [the tree] gets. When you get to the point where your fingers don’t touch anymore, you can put two taps in the tree,” Howard Boyden said, the ‘Tree Hugger’s Rule” his family passed down to him.
But no matter the maple maker’s knowledge, the Boydens said no two bottles of their maple cream or syrup will ever be the same.
“You take what mother nature gives you every day, you treat it the very best you can and this what you have,” Howard Boyden said.