Our Story
The Walden Maple Co. is a project of the Colby/Burnstein family, a team of three that lives deep in the forested wilds of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. It’s the continuation of a 25-year old dream to live and work as close to our land as possible.
Our maple forest has been in production since at least 1862, the date of the first mention of the “sugar orchard” in the land’s historical deed. Our cold, north-facing forest produces a nutritious, mineral-rich sap that we boil down to pure maple syrup – all natural, nothing added – every spring.
We specialize in limited, small batch maple, focusing exclusively on the sap produced by our ecologically managed sugar woods. We don’t import sap or syrup from other farms. Everything we sell, we have made. And everything we have made is from our forest. Our goal is not to be the biggest maple producer, but the producer of the best tasting maple.
We’ve been making maple syrup since we first moved to Walden in 1992. For most of that time we just boiled for ourselves on homemade rigs and never had more than a few dozen taps. Stacy took the early lead and was the chief of maple operations in our early years. Our first batches were family gifts, handed out under the label “Little Jew in the Woods.” It sent her father to the grave laughing.
But in 2010, we decided to up our game and become a commercial producer with a goal of direct sales of all our maple products. We jumped from a few dozen taps to more than two thousand. There were two phases to our growth, first we designed and installed the systems necessary for the “woods work,” basically the collecting and transferring of the maple sap from the woods to the saphouse. We didn’t have the capital necessary to build a sugarhouse at first, so we sold our sap to a neighboring organic sugarmaker for the first three years.
In 2014, we fulfilled a twenty-plus year dream of building our sugarhouse. With the help from a neighbor, we built a classic New England sugarhouse, with a traditional cupola for steam release during a boil and some old schoolhouse windows to give it some of yesteryear’s charm. It also has a woodshed big enough for the 12 cords of wood we will burn each season.
During the season, we live in a sea of stainless steel, keeping the sap chilled and clean right through to the syrup’s final filtering and hot packing. It starts with a 4000-gallon stainless sap collection tank and ends with a boil in a set of 3-foot by 10-foot stainless pans, setting atop a wood-fired evaporator that eats 3-foot long firewood as if to be inspired by Dante.
Our desire to make the best maple syrup comes from a lifelong devotion to good, local food. We’ve grown much of our own food since our arrival in Vermont; even selling it via farmers’ markets, CSAs, and even wholesale, back in our vegetable and berry dreaming days. We’re suckers for the agricultural dreams. And we love fresh, local food and the joys of working our land.
We’re also food activists, running the nonprofit Food & Water, a trailblazer in fighting food irradiation, toxic pesticides and genetically modified foods. It’s been important to us to be involved in both the production of wholesome food and to educate and activate the masses when it comes to the many threats from the industrial food supply.
The work of producing maple is a labor of love for us. It is hard work, for sure, requiring weeks and weeks spent in the cold, northern woods, usually atop snowshoes, preparing for the season, and then many more slightly warmer weeks spent in the sugarhouse boiling when the daily boils are required.
We use Belgian draft horses on our farm for work and pleasure. The infamous Big Jim – the horse in the logo – still pulls firewood for us. The team, Big Jim and Blaze, also help keep the trails cleared in the winter. During the holiday and winter vacation seasons, Michael provides draft horse sleigh rides in Stowe, Vermont.
The sugaring season is a creature of the spring weather, sap flows from the maple trees when the nighttime temperature is below freezing and the daytime temperature rises above freezing, thus creating the pressure changes required to draw up the sap for collection. In Walden, that usually means March and April. Once the maple trees have “budded,” thus putting their energy into leaf production, the maple season is officially over as the sap collected after this time has a distinct off-flavor.
The work of the sugaring season starts long before the sap flows. In the late fall and early winter, we must cut, split and stack more than 12 cords of firewood, and tend to the woods for repairs and damage that may have been cause by wind, storms, and, yes, lightening. When the weather forecast hints that the season is approaching, we must tap each tree, a laborious process of drilling a small tap hole in each of 2000-plus trees and attaching a spout for sap collection. This step alone takes a solid week of walking the woods, tree to tree, on snowshoes and with all the layers a Vermont winter requires.
During the season, in addition to the daily boiling, the sugarwoods must be checked daily for leaks and damage from winter storms. Isabel has proven to be the leak-patrol master, her keen ears and eyes able to detect and repair even the hardest to find leaks. Spring break for Isabel has meant sugar work, and she does it well.
Thank you for sharing in our maple dream. We’re having a blast, producing a very high-quality maple syrup, and looking forward to sharing it with you, our friends, family, and customers from far and wide who appreciate the all-natural goodness of pure Vermont maple syrup.
Our focus is on quality, not quantity, limiting our supplies but allowing us to pay the utmost attention to sap and syrup freshness and cleanliness, and adopting the strictest of food safety guidelines designed for the most nutritious, flavorful product. It’s worth it, because you will taste the difference.
We look forward to providing you with our delicious maple syrup.
Michael, Stacy & Isabel
Walden, Vermont
