As Vermont Maple Fest kicks off, local sugar makers reflect on an unusual tapping season

“It’s been a weird year, but I think it’s been overall, production has been great,” said Cecile Branon, owner of Branon Family Maple Orchards.

The 54th annual Maple Festival kicks off in Saint Albans Friday. The three-day event draws thousands to Vermont to celebrate local sugar makers.

Cecile Branon is a co-chair for Maple Fest and a sugar maker who’s spent decades in the industry.

Branon and her husband have run Branon Family Maple Orchards for 40 years. She said it was a pretty small operation when they first bought the orchard in 1984.

“We started out with about probably 7,000 taps, maybe. And we used to gather them by buckets with horses,” Branon said.

Now the team hand taps around 90,000 maple trees each year. But, Branon said growth has also come with some challenges.

“Last year was a year nobody wanted to remember,” she said.

An unexpected early warm up last year left many Vermont sugar makers missing out on a large part of the tapping season. It usually begins around February and March, but Branon said this year, she made sure to be ready early.

“Our first boil here we started tapping the first of December and our first boil was the week before Christmas,” she said.

And now that the season is wrapping up, she said planning has paid off.

“It’s been a weird year, but I think it’s been overall production has been great,” Branon said.

Anson Tebbetts, Vermont’s secretary of agriculture, said many maple makers around the state had similar experiences, finding more success by starting early this year.

“They do not want to miss that first run because there’s sort of hit or miss whether the weather is going to cooperate or not,” he said.

Tebbetts added a few early spring snowstorms also helped.

“[They] really slowed things down. It was getting too warm, we didn’t have a lot of snow cover. So, I think that probably saved the season for a lot of folks,” Tebbetts said.

Originally published on NBC5.