The Pennant staff is on retreat in a small town in northern Vermont this week, and maple syrup is everywhere. Restaurants, general stores, ski shops, and gas stations, many of them with their own private label. In Newport, which sits on Lake Memphremagog, The Pick and Shovel General Store has a syrup display roughly the size of the bread aisle at most Krogers, rows of amber bottles stacked like it's a competitive sport.
Turns out that's not far off. This is Vermont's version of Ohio State football, minus the press conferences and 142 daily podcasts. Best we can tell, syrup producers don't talk to the media much. They're too busy tapping trees, and the loyalty runs just as deep as any fall Saturday in Columbus.
The process is simple, if unglamorous: tap a sugar maple in late winter when nights are still freezing and days start to thaw, collect the sap, then boil off the water until what's left is syrup, roughly 40 gallons of sap for one gallon of syrup.
The boiling happens in a sugar shack, small wood buildings with steam pouring out the roof, tucked into hillsides across the state. Around here, they're as much a part of the landscape as spotted dairy cows, moose, and the occasional black bear ambling through a backyard.
Soil plays a bigger role than most people realize. Vermont's ground is granite-based, and colder, longer sap runs tend to produce a cleaner, more mineral finish. Ohio's soil is rich in limestone.
Ohio syrup has a home turf: Geauga County, in the state's northeast corner, produces more maple syrup than anywhere else in Ohio by a wide margin, enough that it's nicknamed "Pancaketown USA" and hosts the country's oldest maple festival, running since 1926. Its mix of sugar and red maples tends to yield something sweeter and softer than Vermont's – at least that’s what the people in Geauga County say.
As for demand: back in the 1950s, a huge share of America woke up to warm pancakes, sometimes stuffed with blueberries, chocolate chips on special occasions. That daily ritual has faded somewhat. But the syrup didn't disappear; it just got a promotion.
It's in coffee, cocktails, salad dressings, glazed on salmon and bacon, baked into everything from granola to barbecue sauce. Vermont's answer wasn't eating less syrup. It was finding more places to put it.