WHITEFIELD — The scent of steam in a sugar house is like nothing you’ve ever smelled before.

It’s not sugary sweet, nor is it smoky and dark.

It’s a light benediction on the labor invested every spring in making maple syrup, one of New England’s signature foods.

As the steam from the evaporator tank at Tim’s Sugar Shack wafted toward the vents in the roof of the sugar house Sunday morning, Tim Chase explained, as he does yearly on Maine Maple Sunday, the process of turning the lightly sweet and watery maple sap into the amber liquid that complements everything from pancakes to salmon.

Every year, Chase taps maple trees — when it’s quiet you can hear the faint pings of sap droplets against the metal buckets that hang from tented spigots — and collects the sap. The starting date is different every year. Some years, it’s early. Last year, the first taps went in at the end of March, thanks to a bitterly cold and snowy winter.

The collected sap is stored briefly in a storage tank on a stand behind the sugar house. The longer it sits the darker the syrup will be, Chase said. Gravity draws the sap into a chambered, wood-fired evaporator where over the course of a couple of hours the sap is transformed into a richly hued and flavorful syrup. A sample is taken and catalogued, and after triple filtering, the bottling commences.

The flavor and the quality of the syrup depends entirely on the trees and the soil and the weather.

“Yesterday, the wind was out of the northeast,” Chase said. “There’s an old saying: When the wind’s out of the east, sap runs the least. When the wind’s out of the west, it runs the best.” He doesn’t know why. “One guy said if only we could find a maple tree that could talk, we would know.”

Once the sap starts flowing, work begins, and it doesn’t stop until the magic calculus of daytime and nighttime temperatures and the turn of the season further into spring ends production. Once buds and leaves start appearing, the maple sap loses its sweetness and the season is at an end. The taps will come out of the trees, and in time, the only evidence of syrup production that remains are the holes in the bark.

But while the season’s on, Chase will spend most of the day in the sugar house, overseeing the evaporation, monitoring the temperature gauges and feeding the firebox.

“At night, my wife will come down with two plates. It’s nice and cozy in here, and we’ll sit and have dinner together,” he said.

Curiosity got him started. When his four sons were young, he started boiling sap in a cement block fire pit and it grew from there. He graduated to the hobbyist level and built a small sugar house and the result was gifts for friends and family.

Then some friends were selling a barely used evaporator at a reasonable price, and he bought it, added on to the sugar house, started tapping more trees and added on to the sugar house again.

“No one in the sugar business has ever built a sugar house the right size to start with,” he said.

Somewhere in there, about five or six years ago, Chase got his license from the state and in his years of making syrup he’s earned some acclaim. Although he doesn’t mention it, the Maine Maple Producers Association awarded him second place in 2013 for his dark amber syrup and first place in 2014 in the same category. The ribbons hang along with his personal maple syruping almanac of when the season has started and ended and how many taps were installed over the last several years.

Up in the barn, Martha Chase oversees the syrup sales with Debbie Norton’s help. Norton tracks the number of visitors and dishes up the maple sundaes.

Dennis Gallant had wandered up from his house down the road to check it out and to pick up a treat for his wife, who was at work. They chatted, got to know one another a little better as Gallant spooned up the last of his ice cream. Later, Martha said it was the first chance she had had to meet him and she was thrilled he came by. And while he had to walk only about a quarter-mile, other people have come from Scarborough and Waterville to check out the operation. “We’ve got quite a following,” she said.

This year, Maine Maple Sunday fell on Easter, and to accommodate people who might have a conflict, Martha Chase said they decided to open up on Saturday and about 130 people came through. It was slow on Sunday morning, but church was still in session, and traffic may have picked up later in the day.

But when the season is done, the Chases take a break and put up their feet.

“It’s been quite a run since we got married,” she said. It will be 46 years this year. “Timmy’s not one to let grass grow under his feet.”

Jessica Lowell — 621-5632

jlowell@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @JLowellKJ

Related Stories