Wade Whitney checks out the maple sap lines at Whitney's Maple Spring Farm in Keene. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

KEENE — It all runs in the family for Ned and Wade Whitney — the sap, that is. And right now, the sugary stuff is flowing at the Whitney’s Maple Spring Farm here on Alstead Hill Road.

Wade Whitney has been sugaring since he was a teenager in the 1960s, sharing taps with some cousins and making syrup they sold in school. He said a lot of families in Keene sugared back then, and several kids sold maple candies at school for just over a quarter. Wade’s father was already sugaring a little at the time, but in 1975 they moved away from sugaring as an after-school project and created a larger enterprise that culminated in a sugarbush with around 4,000 taps.

Then, the ice storm in January 1998 flattened their sugarbush. Wade had the trees logged and sold the sugaring equipment, and they didn’t sugar for around 12 years after that.

The Whitneys talked about getting back into maple during those dozen years, toying with the idea of tapping up on their property.

“There’s a lot of Whitney history on Alstead Hill,” said Ned, Wade’s son.

Maple syrup made by the Whitney's Maple Spring Farm on Alstead Hill in Keene (News photo — Lauren Yates)

The property has been in the Whitney family since the 1930s. Wade’s grandfather split the land he owned on Alstead Hill into 17-acre plots and gave them to his five children.

Ned estimated that two-thirds of the houses on Alstead Hill are occupied by Whitneys. In 2010, Wade and Ned decided to get back into the sugaring game on their own property.

“Next thing you know, here we are,” Ned said in the sugarhouse on March 21, surrounded by thousands of dollars in sugaring equipment.

Wade and Ned built their current sugarbush in 2009 and 2010, including the sugarhouse. Wade built the house out of his garage in the summer of 2009, and it was finished by labor day. Ned said they built the sugarbush in around three months, and by the spring of 2010 they were sugaring again.

The operation has grown a little every year since. The sugarbush has around 2,250 taps now, and Ned said he wants to double that count next spring. One of the other Whitney properties has a sugarbush on it, and he wants to tap that next year. There’s potential for an additional 5,000 taps.

Ned Whitney applies defoamer to the boiling maple sap in his evaporator at the Whitney's Maple Spring Farm in Keene. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

Ned’s wife, Jennifer, and their two daughters are also involved in the sugaring season. Jennifer had the idea to create the syrup stand at the bottom of Alstead Hill, which is stocked with Whitney maple products. Before that, Ned said, Wade would sell syrup out of the back of his pickup truck while he was driving around for work. Ned even made him a sign for his truck that said, “Pure New York state maple syrup for sale here.”

“And most of the syrup that we sold got sold out of the backseat of his pickup, because he always had syrup with him,” he said.

Their daughters help with the stand now, checking the inventory, collecting money and turning it in to Jennifer. They help Wade with canning, too, and they go out in the woods and tap. Ned likes that they’re learning a little bit of work ethic.

“I grew up the same way,” Ned said. “They used to put me to work in the sugar woods when I was a little kid.”

They used to have taps in Keene Valley on around 125 buckets, and they’d collect the sap before school.

Ned Whitney starts a fire below his maple syrup evaporator at the Whitney's Maple Spring Farm in Keene. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

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Pandemic successes

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New York’s Maple Weekends returned this year after two years off due to the pandemic, held the past two weekends. But the Whitneys said their maple production never stopped. The only thing that changed during the coronavirus pandemic was the number of people involved in the sugaring process. They had to ask some guys who’d been helping out for years to stop coming, and it was just Ned, Wade, Jennifer and the couple’s two daughters doing all the work. That was hard, Ned said, but the pandemic didn’t affect sales.

“What we expected to be a very negative experience ended up being kind of a whirlwind for business,” Ned said.

Whitney's Maple Spring Farm sells its maple syrup here at the Alstead Hill stand in Keene. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

Ned’s talked to a lot of people in similar trades across the North Country who ran successful businesses during the pandemic. With global supply chain interruptions, local products and services became crucial. The Whitneys were busy with their excavation business as the real estate market boomed and more people were doing at-home projects that required topsoil or stone. And more people traveling to the Adirondacks for socially distant recreation in the outdoors meant more people buying syrup.

The Whitneys don’t usually participate in Maple Weekends because they’re a small operation off the beaten path. They do give tours to students from Keene Central School, though; a batch of first graders and a third-grade class recently came to the farm for a tour. The school also uses Whitney maple for their pancake and French toast day.

Whitney maple products are available at the Alstead Hill syrup stand and at Valley Grocery in Keene Valley, where people can refill a jug with maple syrup and receive a dollar off. Contact them via email at Whitneysmaplespringfarm@gmail.com or by phone at 518-524-6594.

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Dumps and record books

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When the sap really gets flowing in the spring, the Whitney sugarhouse is full of action. Every several minutes, a rush of sap floods in through a vacuum system that connects the Whitneys’ maples to the sugarhouse, where the sap flows into a tub. Imagine a giant drawing a cold, sugary bath. But for the Whitneys, the sound of sap coming into the sugarhouse isn’t a signal to relax — it’s time to pull out the record book.

The Whitneys keep a strict log of their sugaring activity, from every time sap gets pumped into the sugarhouse — what’s called a “dump” — to how many gallons of syrup they produce each year. Ned said Wade is “very particular” about the log.

“He’ll be in the other room and it’ll dump out here, and we’ll holler through the wall, ‘DUMPING!'” Ned explained, adding that Wade often yells back through the wall, “THANK YOU!”

Wade has a knack for numbers. He still remembers the date of their first sap run in 2010 (March 16), the exact amount of vacuum pulling on the trees right now (26 inches), how much he sold maple candy for in grade school (30 cents), and how many taps are bringing sap to the sugarhouse for each dump.

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When the peepers freeze

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The frequency of sap dumps, or the amount of sap produced, depends on the weather. A windy day could slow the flow, and consecutive warm days and nights could end the sap season altogether. There are some old sayings about how weather dictates the sap season. Ned said the “old-timers” would say that sugaring season was over when the ice on the rivers went out, or melted, three times, or when the “peepers,” the frogs that peep during warm spring and summer nights, freeze three times.

“There’s some folklore about the frog theory, that the old-timers just wanted to drink at the sugarhouse, so they told their wives that the frogs hadn’t frozen three times yet,” Ned said. “So we’re not sure about that one.”

But, he said, there may be some truth to the theories. He said there’s a pond behind his family home, and when the night air is filled with the sound of peepers, the sap is usually slowing. Ned said they’re sugaring as long as the days are warmer and the nights are colder. Last week, sap dumps were happening around every nine to 13 minutes.

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How the syrup gets made

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Straight from the tree, sap has a high concentration of water — there’s a lot of processing, boiling and evaporating required to develop the golden maple syrup that will one day adorn a stack of pancakes.

Ned said that for 2% sap, it takes about 43 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. The Whitneys’ sap concentration is running closer to 1.8% or 1.6%, which means it takes around 50 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.

“That’s a lot of boiling,” Ned said.

The Whitneys concentrate their sap with reverse osmosis before boiling it down, which they use to concentrate the sap to 10 to 12%. Ned said that cuts down on boil time by about a sixth.

“Tonight we probably will be here for three or four hours to do what would be a 12-hour boil,” he added.

That means less labor, resources and wood, since the machine the Whitneys use to boil their sap is wood-fired.

The evaporator, the centerpiece of the sugarhouse, comes alive in the evenings. As the sun sets over the sugarbush, Ned opens the stove door of the evaporator and lights the first fire of the night. It doesn’t take long to start roaring, and every six minutes or so, Ned and his friend line up for a two-man pass-and-load assembly line to get the fire stoked again — and again, and again. Meanwhile, steam is rising from the evaporator as the sap heats up and sheds its water. Soon, the whole sugarhouse is a cloud of evaporated sap, a steam room that smells like wood-fired French toast.

Last year the Whitneys made around 200 gallons of syrup, but that wasn’t a great year, Ned said. This year, they hope to fill around 500 to 700 gallons of syrup. However much they end up making, you can bet there will be an exact count, if Wade has anything to say about it.