Jerry Courser outside the sugar house that he and his brother, Tim built nearly 50 years ago on Schoodac Road in Warner.Jerry Courser sits in the sugar house that he and his brother, Tim built nearly 50 years ago on Schoodac Road in Warner.Tim Courser gets ready to load some more wood into the evaporator in their sugar house that he and his brother built nearly 50 years ago.Jerry Courser sits in the sugar house that he and his brother, Tim built nearly 50 years ago on Schoodac Road in Warner.Jerry Courser sits in the sugar house that he and his brother, Tim built nearly 50 years ago on Schoodac Road in Warner.Tim Courser stacks wood in the sugar house that he and his brother built nearly 50 years ago.Tim Courser gets ready to load some more wood into the evaporator in their sugar house that he and his brother built nearly 50 years ago.Tim Courser stacks wood in the sugar house that he and his brother built nearly 50 years ago.Tim Courser gets ready to load some more wood into the evaporator in their sugar house that he and his brother built nearly 50 years ago.Tim Courser jumps over the wood stack in their sugar house that he and his brother built nearly 50 years ago.The Courser brothers father in a photo in their sugar house in Warner.Jerry Courser outside the sugar house that he and his brother, Tim built nearly 50 years ago on Schoodac Road in Warner.Tim Courser gets ready to load some more wood into the evaporator in their sugar house that he and his brother built nearly 50 years ago.The sugar house that Jerry and Tim Courser built nearly 50 years ago on Schoodac Road in Warner.Tim Courser stacks wood in the sugar house that he and his brother built nearly 50 years ago.Tim Courser stacks wood in the sugar house that he and his brother built nearly 50 years ago.Tim Courser stacks wood in the sugar house that he and his brother built nearly 50 years ago.Jerry Courser outside the sugar house that he and his brother, Tim built nearly 50 years ago on Schoodac Road in Warner.A collection of the different grades of maple syrup.The sugar house that Jerry and Tim Courser built nearly 50 years ago on Schoodac Road in Warner.Jerry Courser holds the container that shows the different grades of maple syrup.
By the standards of modern maple sugaring, the Courser brothers’ operation isn’t exactly high-tech. No vacuum pumps, no reverse osmosis, no digital timers.
But their gravity-fed tubes leading into barrels and tanks, with sap boiled down in a sugar house they built when Jimmy Carter was president, is a lot higher-tech than their sugaring once was.
“I ran 400 buckets when I was in high school for my FFA (Future Farmers of America) school project,” said Jerry Courser on Wednesday as he and brother Timothy worked in their sugar house on Schoodac Road in Warner.
As Courser explained in a New Hampshire accent you rarely hear any more this side of Fritz Wetherbee, they started like a lot of New Hampshire families by doing it for themselves. “My father used to sugar back during the war … to have something sweeter to put on his oatmeal,” he said.
These days they produce 200 to 300 gallons of syrup a year from sugar maple trees on various people’s properties in Warner, Webster and Salisbury. “We pay them with syrup,” Courser said. They have no distributor but sell it themselves or via some farmers markets.
On Wednesday they were making Grade A dark robust, a designation based on color. In general, syrup gets darker as the season progresses and the percentage of sugar in sap declines, although it can be variable. Sugar makers can shift the grade down (although not up) from its color if they think that better describes the taste.
Like everybody in the business, Courser has seen the sugaring season move earlier and earlier as our winters warm.
“Years ago they said you never tapped before town meeting day. A lot of people are tapping earlier now,” he said.
Town meeting voting day is held on March 12 this year. It will be followed by New Hampshire’s Maple Weekend is March 16-17, with many sugar houses offering samples and tours. Many communities have events, including the Kearsarge Maple Festival in Warner.
Courser said it’s not unusual to have 300 people stop by over the course of the annual Maple Weekend. Although he added, looking around the sugarhouse, “Not all at once.”
