RUTLAND — The sugarhouse at Sap Castle has been working overtime lately, a true sign that maple syrup season is in full swing and spring is around the corner.
Husband and wife Jon and Lauren Williams run the third-generation farm at 29 Overlook Road. They built and raised their timber frame sugarhouse in 2012 in the same footprint Jon’s grandfather had his sugarhouse, and two years later had their first sugaring season, producing dozens and dozens of gallons of high quality, amber-hued goodness.
“Moving back to the family farm, it was never really a question of whether we’d pick back up on the sugaring — we just knew we would,” Jon said.
He grew up in town right across the street from the farm they call home, on property that was originally part of the family dairy farm. He studied sculpture at MassArt in Boston and lived in the city for several years before moving back to the area.
Lauren is a Wellesley native who attended Kenyon College in Ohio and eventually moved back to Massachusetts. The couple has been together since 2009 and married in October 2017.
“We actually got married in the field next to the sugarhouse, and of course had tiny bottles of syrup as favors,” she shared.
They have lived in the farmhouse that was Jon’s grandparents’ home for almost 10 years now. It sits on 225 acres, most of which they bought back from Heifer International a few years ago, land that Jon’s grandfather had donated to the nonprofit in the 1980s.
Jon and Lauren’s two sons, who are 4 and 1, have lived on the farm their whole young lives, and Jon’s uncle and sister, plus her son, own and live on an adjacent property that was also part of the original family dairy farm.
While Lauren had never experienced the maple syrup making process before meeting her husband, she said she’s “pretty sure Jon has maple syrup in his veins.” “His grandfather started sugaring on this property in the 40s, in conjunction with operating a dairy farm, and Jon grew up making syrup on a small evaporator in his yard,” she said.
Like most kids growing up in New England, Lauren said she “saw sap buckets in the neighborhood and visited a few local farms to see sugaring” when she was a child, but never made any herself until she met her husband.
They are now in their tenth season of producing maple syrup. They have about 600 sap taps on approximately 500 trees, and are expanding a bit each season.
“We also do buckets in a few neighbors’ yards, but the vast majority is on lines down in our back woods,” Lauren said.
They typically produce upwards of 120 gallons of maple syrup from those trees each season, she said, which means collecting at least 6,000 gallons of sap and boiling it down, and they welcome people to come by to see the process up close.
“We love to have visitors at the sugarhouse to show them the whole process and offer samples,” Jon said. “There’s no charge to visit, just swing by.”
The Sap Castle is open most weekend days during peak sugaring season, generally February and March. The business’ website (sapcastle. com) has a calendar showing when they’re open, and they update their social media about their schedule since they are “so weather-dependent.”
“Things like drought or too much rain throughout the year definitely have an impact on the trees and their health, which impacts how much sugar they put out in their sap, which impacts how much syrup we can make,” Lauren explained. “The weather during the winter is obviously a huge variable. Was it a particularly cold or warm winter? Was there much snow cover protecting the trees’ roots?”
She said they “had incredibly early start to the season this year,” first tapping the trees on Dec. 28.
“We’re hopeful the sap will keep running at least through the third week of March, since March 18 and 19 is statewide open sugarhouse weekend and that’s a big weekend for people to come see us boiling.”
During the sugaring season, they boil two to four times a week depending on how much sap they’ve collected, which again depends on the weather.
“We try to time things so we’re boiling every weekend day, but sap can only keep for a few days, so sometimes we need to boil midweek,” Jon said.
They fit all this in on top of their full-time jobs and managing the family. Jon is a self-employed carpenter and builder, so he’s able to be “very flexible with his time during sugaring season,” and Lauren works from home.
“I am able to flex my hours enough and do most of my sugaring work on the weekends and in the evenings,” she said.
When asked what they enjoy about the syrup-producing process, they did not hesitate to say being out in nature.
“Spending time in the woods, especially at the point of the year where it shifts from winter to the beginning of spring, is really enjoyable,” Lauren said. “And the alchemy of turning something that looks and acts like water into delicious liquid gold is pretty exciting.”
Of course, one of the biggest challenges they face is the notoriously fickle New England weather.
“The double-edged sword of the weather is definitely a challenge,” Jon confirmed. “We need a pretty specific daily temperature swing, from daytime highs in the 40s to nighttime lows in the 20s for the sap to run. When it’s too cold during the day, too warm at night, or just swinging all over the place, the sap stops running and we just have to wait for it to start again. It makes scheduling things challenging.”
Once the sap is boiled down, they sell the maple syrup in glass bottles that range in size from 1.7 to 64 oz., and recently started making maple syrup candies, which “have been a big hit.” They also offer Sap Castle merch including hoodies, winter hats and trucker hats.
“People seem to really appreciate local products made ‘the old way,’ ” Lauren said of sticking to the tried-andtrue syrup making methods. “Granted, we have more efficient equipment than when Jon’s grandfather was making syrup in the ‘50s, but we’re still hauling and chopping wood, loading it into the evaporator, filtering and bottling by hand, and talking to every customer who comes in.”
They said it means a lot to them to have people interested in their farm and that overall, the community “has been incredibly excited and supportive.”
“Lots of time people are surprised there’s a sugarhouse they can visit right in their neighborhood,” Lauren said. “We have lots of repeat customers who come year after year, which we love, and it’s always exciting to see people, especially kids, for the first time and introduce them to the sugaring process. And people love the syrup.”
When asked what that kind of support means to them, she said it “means a lot to know that people appreciate and enjoy our work.”
“We do every local event we can, like the recent Tase of Rutland as part of the Smithsonian travelling exhibit, and the Fall Festival of Forgotten Arts in town. It’s amazing to talk to local people who had no idea there was a farm like this locally. At the same time, social media and statewide media has been a great boon for us. We get folks coming from Boston, the Cape, and outside Massachusetts, which is really nice.”
