Photos by Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

Britt Boucher flicks frozen sap off a tap while gathering the sweet stuff in Montgomery County.

Jolie Boucher giggles after finishing off a plateful of blueberry pancakes and homemade maple syrup.

Jolie Boucher, 8, watches as her mom pours homemade maple syrup on her brother Jake's blueberry pancakes.

Steam rises from a pot of boiling sugar maple sap on the side stoop of the Bouchers' Blacksburg home.

BLACKSBURG -- Before he takes its sweet sap, Britt Boucher gives the maple tree some sugar.

"Just sit the bucket on the tree, kiss the tree and thank it for its sugar," Boucher said as he smooched and patted a towering sugar maple in a snow-covered grove.

Boucher is no ordinary tree-hugger -- or kisser, for that matter. The Blacksburg-based forester spent much of February and March tapping about a half-dozen sugar maples on a Montgomery County farm to collect the lifeblood sap and convert it into pure, sweet, maple syrup.

Maple-tapping is not common in these parts, which is one reason why Boucher wanted to try it. Another reason is because the store-bought stuff is too darn expensive. One gallon of pure maple syrup sells for more than $115 at a Blacksburg health foods store where Boucher and his wife shop. That's more than double the price of a barrel of oil.

"We can't afford it," he said, as he drove across a snowy field during the first week of March. "It's completely out of our price range."

But the kids love it. So he decided to make it.

"It will make you weep to watch your little child lick the plate of maple syrup you've made," he said.

That's why, on a crisp morning beneath a blanket of blue sky, he strapped a bright yellow, 10-gallon Igloo cooler to his back. Clad in a yellow Gore-Tex coat, with tufts of hair jutting from beneath his toboggan hat, Boucher, 53, trudged through the late-winter snow to gather blocks of frozen sap from his buckets, and to thank the maples for making his children happy.

The sweet science

The reason widespread maple-tapping doesn't occur here is simple. According to Boucher, the temperatures do not get cold enough at night during late winter to encourage fast-rising sap to flow during the warmer days.

Although some maple-tapping operations exist in West Virginia and Virginia -- especially in high-elevation counties that include Grayson and Highland -- most North American maple tapping happens in the cold-weather climates of the Northeast and in Canada, where the combination of sub-freezing March nights and warmer days lead to gushing sap flows.

Still, Boucher wanted to try. After his company, Foresters Inc., completed a timber harvest for a customer, he asked permission to tap a few century-old sugar maples left behind.

He used a hand drill to bore a ⁷₁₆-inch hole in the tree, then inserted a metal, spout-shaped tap, setting it in place with a couple of strokes from the back of an ax. He hung a five-gallon, recycled, plastic honey bucket he got from a health-food store on the tap. The tree does the rest.

"You get a fly in it once in a while," he said as he placed the bucket on the tap through a hole cut in the side and fastened the lid shut. "That's disappointing to the kids."

Boucher checked buckets set days earlier and banged out the frozen sap into his cooler. The trees had not produced much, not like on a previous weekend when Boucher brought his wife and kids out for a sap-gathering romp in the woods.

"It was like a date," he said.

Some date. His wife, Robin, lugged two five-gallon buckets of sap uphill to the car -- in the rain.

During one sap-gathering adventure with the family, Boucher's 8-year-old daughter, Jolie, complained of thirst. With no water on them, Boucher directed her to the cooler strapped on his back. She put her mouth up to the spout and sipped the sweet sap, which is really just sugar water. Sap from the tap.

Plate-licking good

You could say that the family that makes syrup together sticks together, or gets sticky together.

Back in their Blacksburg home, where Robin Boucher home-schools Jolie and son Jake, 4, the family keeps an electric kettle outside, boiling with sap.

A plume of steam rose from the electric kettle as the frothy sugar water bubbled and foamed. It takes about 43 gallons of sap to render one gallon of syrup, so Boucher added his freshly gathered ice-blocks of sap. Jolie helped gently lay the ice in the kettle, careful to break off the pieces with bugs in them.

In about 48 hours, most of the water will have evaporated. The remaining liquid will be slow-cooked indoors on a wood stove, then filtered through wool. Then it's plate-licking time.

Robin Boucher, an artist and a former university art instructor, said it took a batch or two to get the syrup-making method just right. She joked that, at one point, she thought the children would grow up and leave home without ever tasting Dad's homemade syrup.

Dad figured it out, though, and the Bouchers stashed away seven half-pint jars of sweet, amber-colored syrup. Such a trove could command a high price on the open market. That won't happen, however, considering how much time and effort it has taken just to make seven jars.

"We'd have to sell it at $40 a jar," Robin Boucher said.

Right after returning from his morning round of sap-gathering, Britt Boucher quickly whipped up a batch of blueberry pancakes. With the adults at one table and the children at another, the Bouchers polished off a jar of homemade syrup.

The finished product poured a little thinner than the syrup you find in stores -- that's because the Bouchers don't want to overcook the syrup and ruin it, not after you've lugged a 10-gallon cooler of sap through the woods -- but the taste was as sweet and maple-flavored as any $100-per-gallon syrup from Maine.

Robin Boucher said not everyone appreciates the family's homemade syrup.

"The nieces and nephews didn't like it," she said. "It wasn't Aunt Jemima."

Jolie and Jake share no such aversions.

"Believe me, the plate is spotless," their father said.