Maple Syrup Making in Elmore Vermont
As a little girl, I didn’t like Maple Syrup. My family always had “dark robust” from a family friend in Pennsylvania and there was something about it that my little kid palette did not care for. As I grew up, I eventually fell in love with a Maple Syrup Superfan, and we moved to New England together. Now it’s in our morning tea, our ice cream bowls, granola, pancakes, and a variety of savory treats get a drizzle of the good stuff too. I’m a convert, thank god.
With this photo essay, my goal was simply to be there and to photograph everything they showed me so I could show you. I want to tell the behind the scenes of this long-loved tradition in the American epicenter of maple-syrup. I wanted to go where they went and see what they saw and listen to what they said. I wanted a tiny immersion into the world of Maple Syrup, since a full immersion into the syrup itself seems out of reach. I wanted to be treated as family and taught craft like a daughter. I wanted them to let me see what they loved, and I got all that tenfold.
Maple Syrup has history. It’s a potion with centuries of craft, patience, nature, innovation, and diligence built into each delicious drop. It’s more than meets the eye… and tongue. It’s something worth learning, and passing down, and ultimately being preserved as something that humans seemed to get right thus far.
I stomped my boots on the front mat of a tiny shack and stepped inside, where I was greeted warmly by John and John, two Vermont sugar makers I would soon come to know. The night before, in a very wintery December, I had left behind my cozy apartment and my Maple superfan husband, and arrived in Elmore, Vermont, a small town tucked into the Green Mountains. The Johns, as I would come to think of them, had kindly invited me into their sugar shack, a shared operation of three men who split the work of tapping, cleaning, and canning, each selling the prized maple syrup in their own separate businesses. It was my first day with the guys and they were already filling my bag with maple candy and my brain with detail upon detail of how maple syrup is made.
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