Why we still boil over wood
Most syrup these days is boiled with oil or natural gas. Ours has been over a wood fire since 1988 — and there's a reason we haven't switched.
Notes from the sugarhouse · 3 min read
If you walked into a working sugarhouse in 2026, eight times out of ten you'd find an evaporator burning oil, propane, or natural gas. They're cleaner. They're faster. They give the operator a thermostat instead of a fire. A modern oil-fired evaporator can run twice as long between rests, with a fraction of the labour.
Our evaporator burns wood. It always has. We have not been talked out of it.
What a wood-fired boil actually is
It's a long day. You start before light, splitting and stacking, drawing sap from the buckets, lighting the firebox, and feeding it dry hardwood at intervals you learn by feel. The pan above it holds an inch and a half of sap, sometimes less. As the fire roars, the pan rolls. Steam climbs into the cupola and out through the louvered roof in a soft white column you can see from the road.
You don't walk away. Sap boiling at full pressure can scorch in minutes if the level drops. You learn to read the foam — too tight and you've over-fired; loose and lazy and you need more wood. You add fresh sap from the holding tank at one end and skim off the syrup near the other, where the boil has stayed long enough to concentrate.
It is, by any modern accounting, an inefficient way to make a thing.
“You don't walk away. You learn to read the foam.”
Why we keep doing it
Two reasons, neither of them romantic on their own but real together.
The first is the syrup itself. Wood-fired evaporators tend to give a slightly more complex syrup — a hint of caramelization at the surface of the pan, a touch of smoke in the cupola that finds its way back into the steam, the slower concentration that lets the sap's natural minerals come forward. Most people, blind tasting, can't pick it out. Some can. We can.
The second is the rhythm of the day. A wood-fired boil runs at the speed of the wood you cut and the sap you collected. You can't rush it. You can't extend it. You have to be there for the whole thing — sleeping next to the fire if you have to. There's a quiet honesty to that kind of work. It's the same kind of honesty you find in bread that's been bulk-fermented overnight, or in a stew that's been on the back of the stove since lunch.
Not for everyone
We aren't going to tell you a propane evaporator makes worse syrup. Most of them don't. Most commercial syrup in North America comes off propane or oil, and most of it is excellent. If we made ten times as much syrup as we do, we'd probably be on propane too — there's no way to scale wood without scaling labour, and labour at a sugarhouse is mostly one or two people who already work too many days.
But at our scale, on a small hilltop in Mulmur, with the evaporator we built in 1988 still in good shape — wood is what works. The smell stays in the pine boards of the sugarhouse all year. The boil draws a column of steam our neighbours can see from a concession road over. The kids who grow up around it learn what it is to feed a fire for ten hours.
That's why we still do it. Not because slower is automatically better, but because in this one case, on this one farm, slower is what made the syrup taste like itself.
