The Sugar Season Read Online Free PDF

reverse-osmosis machines that concentrated sap, 166 gallons would have been a good year. They would have boiled those 10,000 gallons over many winter days and nights. But 166 gallons at Bascom’s was, to use a familiar term, a drop in the bucket.
    I could hear Bruce’s words, saying that 166 gallons, at a wholesale price of $35 a gallon, were worth a total of $5,810, which was not so bad for a day’s effort at the evaporator. Though, actually, the production on February 3 was not a full day’s effort. Kevin would have produced those 166 gallons in less than one hour.

4
    S TRAIGHT AT IT AND ALL OUT
    P ETER RHOADES , a forester and Bruce’s closest friend, who had gathered sap with him as a boy, been his college roommate, and put together timber plans for him over the years, said that Bruce built the new building “so he could compete.” Peter knew about all the past constructions and additions at Bascom’s, how Bruce had added on to the sugarhouse six or seven times and then had torn everything down and started over. Peter said, “It hasn’t worked out well for Bruce to go slowly and wait. It’s been best for him to go straight at it and all out.”
    Of course Bruce had already been competing. Bruce operated in what was deemed the “second tier” of maple companies, composed primarily of single-owner proprietor businesses. Bruce’s primary competitor in the second tier was David Marvin of Butternut Mountain Farms in Morrisville, Vermont. They ran neck and neck, or hand in hand, depending on the situation. Others in the second tier were McClure’s Maple (which was bought by Dutch Gold when David McClure retired), Anderson’s in Cumberland, Wisconsin, andHighland Sugarworks in Barre, Vermont. There were also a few Canadian companies in the second tier, such as Bolduc’s Maple, Bernard & Sons, and others in the maple-rich region of Beauce County, Quebec.
    Arnold Coombs had a description for the type of individual who owned these companies and played in the field of the second tier. He was a person who could manage risk, and also someone who could manage a large number of relationships. In Arnold’s words, “He’s the type of person who can borrow ten million dollars and put his house on the line.” Arnold said that person also needed a wife who could stomach those risks.
    But Bruce did not put up the new building to compete in the second tier. He was aiming for the first tier. For him that meant Maple Grove, the largest maple syrup distributor in the United States. Maple Grove is based in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and has a long history of owners. Maple Grove is now owned by B&G Foods, the food products corporation that owns Ortega, Polaner, and Vermont Maid, an artificial pancake syrup. Maple Grove has sales of $80 million per year, and people on Wall Street read B&G Foods’ financial reports to see how the maple syrup industry is doing. Maple Grove supplies Walmart. They sell 40 million of those 1.5-ounce bottles of syrup each year, primarily to the Cracker Barrel Restaurants. Those nips contained pure maple syrup until the shortage of 2008, when, out of necessity, Maple Grove blended with other sugars. After the shortage passed, Maple Grove continued to blend because it would have cost several million dollars to return to pure maple syrup. For Bruce, Maple Grove had long been a model. He used to go on tours of Maple Grove, look at the machinery, memorizethe names and numbers, and then slip out to his car to write down the information.
    He didn’t ever directly say that he wanted to overtake Maple Grove; in fact, he said it would never happen in his lifetime, though he didn’t actually mean it. He would say that someone else was going to: “I predict that David Marvin will overtake Maple Grove one day,” he told me more than once. It took a while for me to understand that, by that statement, Bruce also meant himself. Once, when he gave me a tour of the new building when the foundation was being poured,