Running of the sap

NEW HOPE- When you think of tapping sugar maples to make maple syrup, is your mental image anything like mine - an old-fashioned vision of metal buckets hanging from trees?

Forget these romantic notions, because sugarhouses are state-of-the-art these days. They look more like something you'd see in a science museum - at least at Schoolyard Sugarbush in New Hope it does. This sugarbush, the woods where the sugar maple trees grow and are tapped, resembles a vast outdoor laboratory, with continuous plastic pipelines running from tree to tree carrying the flowing sap, Tinkertoys, like connectors adjusted daily to monitor air pressure, and a clear box which collects the sap from blue tubes all across the forest, releasing it all in one big dump into a stainless steel holding tank. Vehicles transport the sap up the road a few miles to the sugarhouse, where the fragrant sweet smell and telltale steam rising from the roof tell you this is where the sap gets processed: 55 gallons of sap boil down to one gallon of syrup.

Schoolyard Sugarbush, named for the one-room schoolhouse on the corner, is a family operation run by Dan Weed, who got hooked on making maple syrup 14 years ago when his sister, still in high school, was given a hobby version of an evaporator. Dan comes from a long line of local food producers, his grandfather started New Hope Mills; the old mill is just up the road. Dan's father Don, soft-spoken and articulate, helps with the maple production. He spent some time one chilly-yet-sunny recent afternoon to give me a tour of the operation.

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