It was about 25 degrees out on a bright Monday morning and Needham residents Nick Tatar and John Snellings were standing over a bubbling, boiling, wood-fired contraption in Tatar’s driveway on Standish Road making maple syrup. The air smelled of pine smoke and maple steam and there were buckets of sap nearby (along with barrels of it under Tatar’s deck), courtesy of neighbors with sugar maple trees in their yards.
“It’s nice when you’re your own boss,” Tatar said. “You can decide when you want to take on a job and when you need to make maple syrup.”
New England is, of course, famed for its maple syrup, but it’s typically made in Maine sugarhouses, not suburban driveways — at least until Tatar came along.
Then an administrator of student life at Olin College, Tatar noted that his neighborhood was full of sugar maples. The developers who built there in the 1960s and ’70s, he said, commonly planted one or two large trees in the front yard of each house. Fifty years later, those trees are majestic old growth, many with the upraised, inverted-umbrella branches and rough striated trunk bark that distinguish sugar maples (at least in winter). And they’re everywhere.
Tatar started syrup-making nine years ago with his own tree and some advice from an acquaintance in Lexington, but neighbors quickly became interested and began to contribute. “We’ve done as many as 60 trees and can collect upwards of 300 gallons of sap in a week,” Tatar said.
One of those neighbors is Snellings, who was there to help, or at least to keep Tatar company. The stove and the sap tray need frequent replenishment, which means that once Tatar starts boiling, someone needs to be in his driveway all day. Snellings met Tatar in Tatar’s current role as a contractor. “I hired him to fix my fence,” Snellings said. “The last day that he was there, my wife Patrice said, ‘Oh, by the way, that’s the maple sugar guy.’ And so I said, ‘Hey Nick, next year I’m with you.’ We’ve tapped a number of trees on the other side of Great Plain and I bring all the sap over.”
It’s been a good week for Needham tree sap, Tatar reported. “A 40-degree day will pull the sap up out of the roots,” he said. “And then at night it settles back down. So the sap is moving up and down the outer two inches of the tree and we shunt a little of it off.”
The sap is clear and nearly tasteless because it’s mostly water. As the water evaporates (famously, 40 gallons of sap per gallon of syrup), the remainder slowly becomes amber — and sweeter. Tatar knows it’s ready when the temperature of the bath begins to rise. Water boils at 212 degrees but syrup has a higher boiling point, so when the liquid reaches about “seven ticks above boiling,” it’s ready.
“We get excited when the thermometer starts to rise,” Tatar said, “but it takes forever to increase those last few degrees.” The resulting syrup gets distributed back to the families whose trees have supplied the sap.
Tatar’s study of neighborhood trees will no doubt serve him as a member of the newly created town tree committee. He pointed out that the large front yards of those 50-year-old houses allowed for big trees. “The roots mostly spread horizontally,” he said. “Houses with small setbacks and small yards can only support ornamental trees. And their water tables change, so the roots may have to tolerate wetter conditions.”
Years of boiling sap have made this administrator-turned-contractor into a syrup connoisseur. He strongly recommended serving Needham syrup over vanilla ice cream. “Darker syrups can stand alone,” he said. “Something about the notes of this sap just calls out for vanilla.”
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