This freezing winter is great news for your maple syrup

Every winter, John Cermak and his family drill holes into 2,200 maple trees on their 45-acre farm. They hammer steel spouts into those holes, and then they wait.

“The ideal weather for us is when it freezes at night and then thaws during the day,” he said.

Sugarbush Creek Farm is in Middlefield, Ohio, about an hour east of Cleveland. This last winter was the region’s coldest in more than a decade — perfect for making maple syrup. Then in February, the temperatures warmed a little, and slow drips of sap started trickling into their system of tubes.

This is how maple syrup starts. Each tree will produce dozens of gallons of sap this season — which is good, because it takes 40 gallons to make one gallon of syrup.

“Maple syrup is not a get rich quick scheme. It’s not even a get rich slow scheme,” Cermak said.

Now, the Cermaks are boiling down nearly 8,000 gallons of sap, stored in giant tubs.

They all have day jobs, so they’re just getting started as dusk arrives. They’ll be camped in the sugar house until roughly 1 a.m., throwing logs they harvested last fall into a furnace every five minutes, reducing that sap into a golden syrup.

This year, their first boil was mid-February. And the Cermaks say that’s a normal year.

“The season is starting one to two weeks sooner in areas,” said Adam Wild, who directs Cornell University’s Uihlein Maple Research Forest. “Overall, I think the long term trend shows that a season is shortened by like three days at this point.”

Meanwhile, Wild said, demand for maple syrup in the U.S. has quadrupled in the last two decades as people look for natural foods with fewer ingredients.

So far, adapting to the shorter season and increased demand has meant improved storage systems, tubes, vacuum pumps, and leak sensors. The Cermaks already have all that.

“It's not that the maple trees are stopping what they're doing. It's just they're changing the times when they do it,” said Eli Suzukovich III, who teaches environmental policy at Northwestern University and does a course on maple trees.

He says the bigger problem is that the industry isn’t changing along with the climate. There’s a mentality around when producers tap because that’s when they’ve always done it, regardless of the weather.

“It's the small producers that really you need to watch what they're doing. They're going to be crucial and probably lead the way in how syrup is produced,” Suzukovich said.

Small producers like Sugarbush Creek Farm start boiling when the sap starts flowing. This year, that was mid-February. Two years ago — an especially mild year — it was January 10. 

“You just always have to be ready. So it doesn't really matter what the calendar date is,” said Jim Cermak, the farm’s patriarch. “Who cares? You tap when it gets warm and cold.”