Narrator: You'd never guess it, but tucked in this Vermont forest under a couple feet of snow is a giant maple-syrup farm. In fact, it's the largest
maple-syrup forest owned by a single-source
producer in the world. But at The Maple Guild
in Island Pond, Vermont, you won't see guys in flannels
carrying buckets of sap. OK, maybe you'll see some flannel, but here, the art of sugaring
is more like a science. I think a lot of people
look at maple syrup and they think of table syrup.
They think of corn syrup. They think of some of
the more popular things that they see on their shelves, right? And that's not who we are or what we do. You can't create this in a lab. This has to come from
Mother Nature in the trees. Narrator: Three Jersey boys founded The Maple Guild in 2013, and by 2015, they'd tapped
their first maple tree. So the company may be
young, but it's not small. Today, it has almost half a million taps. That's roughly 133 times as many as the average sugar maker in Vermont, and all those taps are
on 24,000 acres of land. In the world of sugaring, that size forest is unheard of. So how exactly does The Maple Guild produce syrup on a macro scale? Well, it all starts with the trees. These are sugar maple trees, and The Maple Guild has 460,000 of them spanning across the
Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and into Canada. Starting in December each year, crews spend two months
putting plastic taps into each one of these trees by hand. The same tree can be tapped for decades. Mike: Next year, we reuse everything, and we tap 8 inches high or low and 8 inches over so that
we never harm a tree. It always allows it to heal. Narrator: The sugaring season usually runs from February to April, but that's completely dependent on the weather forecast. John: Obviously, when
the weather cooperates, and when Mother Nature
gives us sap to pull, and that's when the
temperature's above freezing during the day and
below freezing at night, that's when the sap runs. Narrator: When the sap is running, it's extracted either through
vacuum tubing or gravity. Six thousand miles of plastic tubing carry the sap from the
trees to pump stations. These are called reverse-osmosis houses. This is where the sap is collected and the water in the sap is filtered out, leaving a high-sugar-content concentrate. Sap has 2% sugar,
concentrate has 20% sugar, so what we're doing in the
reverse-osmosis process is we're pulling water out of the sap and concentrating the maple
syrup into another solution. Narrator: Because so much water is removed during this process, it takes about 44 gallons of sap to make just 1 gallon of maple syrup. That sugar concentrate
is loaded up into trucks and brought to the sugar house where it's finally
turned into maple syrup. In traditional sugaring techniques, turning sap into syrup means
boiling it over direct heat so the water evaporates. But The Maple Guild pioneered a new method that speeds up the process. It's called Steam-Crafting. Instead of boiling the sap, it's steam-heated at a lower
temperature using coils. With this system, The Maple
Guild can make 55 gallons of maple syrup in just 90 seconds, while in traditional boiling techniques, it can take anywhere
between nine and 56 hours to produce just 1 gallon of syrup. Not only is the
Steam-Crafting method quicker, but the company says it also produces a more nuanced maple flavor. Because sap can go bad quickly, it has to be transported
to the sugar house within three hours of being tapped. And usually within six hours, it will become that golden maple syrup. John: When the sap is
running, it can run for a day, it can run for a week, and then it can stop for
two days or three weeks, and it's really whatever
the weather gives us. But whenever that sap is running, we will have people at this plant 18, 24 hours a day nonstop
while that sap is running because we can't afford to lose any of it. Narrator: Once the
sap's turned into syrup, it's tested to make sure
the sugar levels are right. Next, it's sent through
filters to remove impurities, and it's tested for grading. The lighter the color of
syrup, the higher the grade. Because The Maple Guild syrup
has a short cooking time, it's lighter in color, giving it a consistent
grade A, golden rating. The golden syrup is then pumped
into stainless-steel barrels where it's stored until
it's time to be bottled up. Each bottle is filled, capped, cleaned, and labeled by hand here. The company expects to fill over a million bottles this year. The Maple Guild is vertically integrated, meaning it owns every step of this process from tree to table. - The maple industry has been stagnant for decades upon decades upon decades. It's all small farmers doing their own thing
on their own property, selling to the big conglomerate operators, and those guys making syrup, mostly private labels, some branded, and selling it out to the industry until we came along. And we're vertically integrated, we own the trees, right
through the manufacturing. Very capital-intensive, which is probably the barriers to entry for anybody else to do this. Narrator: In the last five years, the maple-syrup industry has undergone somewhat of a revolution, and at the forefront are
companies like The Maple Guild. Canada has historically
dominated this market, producing 70% of the world's maple syrup, and while it still owns the top spot, the US is gaining ground. United States production has
doubled in the last decade, rising from 1.9 million
gallons produced in 2008 to 4.16 million in 2018, and leading the charge is Vermont. Dubbed the maple-syrup capital of the US, the tiny state produces
40% of the maple syrup in the entire United States. In fact, Vermont's production
has grown 254% since 2000. So the market was set for
a large-scale production, but no one in the Vermont maple industry had taken on the
unconventional sugaring model until The Maple Guild. It entered the scene as
demand was taking off. Breweries across the state had started using maple syrup in their products. Oversea interest in pure
maple syrup had spiked, and Americans on a health-food kick were turning to maple syrup as a natural alternative to refined sugar. And The Maple Guild is
still riding that wave, selling branded products across 50 states and infusing its syrups
with flavors like coffee, pumpkin spice, and bourbon. You got original, vanilla, bourbon, coffee, and salted caramel. It smells like the woods, which is where it came from. It tastes like sugar. I'm in. And while it all depends on what Mother Nature gives them, The Maple Guild does have
an annual production goal. John: Our goals are 150 to 200,000 gallons of maple syrup, we'd be OK with. Narrator: The company's not
only bottling it up as syrup but using it in about 17
other maple-based products. First, there's the maple butter. Maple syrup is cooked down and
then poured into this mixer until it becomes a luscious cream. That stuff is cooked and jarred by hand and then hits the assembly
line to be capped and labeled. This is what I've been
waiting for this whole time. Mmm. It's like icing. That's so good! There's also naturally
fermented maple vinegar, eight different maple-sweetened teas, and seven unique maple-sweetened waters. The Maple Guild hopes
that by introducing maple into as many categories as possible, it can show the versatility of the product and bring attention to where
the golden syrup comes from: here, in a Vermont forest. Next up for The Maple Guild: kombucha, a kefir drinking water, and nitro coffee, all made from and sweetened by pure Vermont maple syrup.
