Maple Leaves

Sugary goodness at Back Creek Farms

Valerie Lowry tends a six-foot pan of hot maple sugar water with a watchful eye. The open boiling pan emits a sweet-scented vapor, and tree sand creates swirling patterns on the surface of the simmering water, lit by the heavenly sunlight beaming through a skylight in the rafters. All is quiet except for the sounds of burbling water and the occasional rustling of Fred, the barn owl, who nests nearby.

Just when the sugar water is making its final conversion to maple syrup, Valerie scrapes something sticky from the sides of the pan. It’s a soft mass of semi-solid maple sugar, as sweet and fleeting as the air above a plate of pancakes. This is what she calls the skimmings, the reward to the syrup makers that only materializes in the precious seconds before the syrup is ready. “That’s when the skimmings are delicious,” Valerie smiles.

Together, Pat and Valerie Lowry have been making maple syrup for 20 years, but Pat Lowry has been at it almost his whole life—tapping Highland County maple trees since he was 8 years old, trailing along at his father’s hip and huddling near the bubbling iron kettles to keep warm. The Lowrys still make maple syrup the old fashioned way, in a long, open rectangular pan cooking over a wood fire. Back Creek Farms is one of about 10 maple syrup makers in the area known as Virginia’s Switzerland, but they’re the only ones left on Back Creek, a 60-mile-long tributary of the Potomac, where once the sugar maple steam hung like a fog on chilly winter mornings.

Making maple syrup this way is a lesson in observation, starting with watching the weather. Specific conditions must be met for maple syrup. The air must be cold enough to freeze overnight and just on the other side of freezing during the day for the trees to “run,” an expression that describes the water inside the maple trees on its journey through xylem and phloem, from the roots to the buds.

maple-trees

On a typical day during the boiling season, Pat wakes up early and checks the weather. He shuffles off to the sugar house to stoke the fire under the pan, where the maple sugar water will boil slowly until it becomes syrup. Valerie, after ferrying a batch of her homemade breakfast burritos to the sugar house, will take over tending the fire, watching to make sure it burns continuously and feeding wood into the fire by hand.

With Valerie tending the pan, Pat goes on his rounds checking on the sugar bushes—the various stands of sugar maple trees that the Lowrys have tapped. Back Creek Farms is unique in that it isn’t sitting on a particularly prolific sugar bush compared to other producers in the area. The Lowrys tap their own trees, their lines cutting through the brush and buckets dangling from the bark, but they also tap on neighboring properties. When Pat heads out on the byways around the farm to collect the maple water, it requires a certain amount of visiting and catching up.

“While most producers have formal written contracts, we operate on friendship and trust,” Valerie explains. “We keep track of the amount of sugar water we collect from each location, and, based on the landowners’ desires, pay them either in syrup or cash.” So familiar are they with one another that Valerie has taken to making the deposits to the landowner’s bank account at the local bank herself, no deposit slip required.

There are a couple of ways to know when a batch of syrup is ready. The modern method involves reading a hydrometer, which measures the density of sugar in the water. At 66 percent, the transformation is complete. “But the way the old timers tell when it’s ready,” explains Valerie, “is to look for what’s called the apron,” a slowly dripping curtain of syrup that slides off the back of the spoon, like the “nappe” chefs await when making a sauce. When the skimmings and the hydrometer and the apron all confirm that the syrup is ready, Pat and Valerie, in their matching Duluth work pants and Back Creek Farms t-shirts, begin the heavy, hurried process of pouring that batch into the filter.

The boiling takes place in the middle of the sugar house, which is flanked by a small kitchen on the left and a gift shop on the right; both are additions to the original structure. The door to the kitchen has been autographed by the sugar house’s many visitors, and cursive signatures snake past the doorknob. On the opposite wall, tortoise shells, animal skulls, and abandoned birds’ nests—evidence of Pat’s frequent walks in the woods—are displayed in a spooky tableau. In the gift shop, glass bottles and plastic jugs of syrup, both maple and hickory, line the shelves, alongside maple syrup ephemera. In the front window, the sun bounces off different grades of syrup in a kaleidoscope of warm hues. Valerie is generous with tasting pours, and the bottles are outfitted with handy speed pours, which smoothly render the amber liquid into little plastic sample cups.

syrup-toast

There is no official date that marks the beginning or end to the syrup season. A typical season can be anywhere from six to 10 weeks long, and finding the sweet spot relies on intuition. “Every year, people around here say, ‘Do you think there’s going to be a syrup season this year?’ and I say, ‘Do you think the trees are going to leaf up this year?’” says Valerie with a laugh. “Every year, the trees leaf out, and, if they’re going to make leaves, the roots have to get this stuff up to the branches.”

During that stretch, syrup makers are locked in a full-time cycle of tapping, collecting, and boiling. Bottling happens later, when the producers have time to catch their breath. The end of the season means the coming of spring, and there are as many anecdotal ways to mark its onset as there are residents of Highland County (about 1,000, give or take).

The season skids to a halt when the sugar maple trees begin to bud. “Bud-y syrup tastes like dirty socks,” Pat says. He swears by his practice of listening for the peep frogs, who come out at night with their incessant peeping when the weather starts to turn warm. When the air gets cool again, the peep frogs take their songs back to the pond, repeating the volley several times. “The third time the peep frogs come up is when we stop making syrup because that’s when spring is here,” Pat says. “It’s proven itself time after time.”

Having made syrup every year of his life since childhood, you could say that Pat Lowry was comfortable with things as they were. A contractor by trade, he knew he could offload a season’s worth of syrup in a couple of days at the Maple Festival, an event produced by the Highland County Chamber of Commerce that welcomes thousands of visitors to the region each year. But Valerie saw an opportunity to grow. After her son-in-law gave them a bourbon barrel from Richmond’s Reservoir Distillery in 2017, things began to change for the mom and pop syrup operation.

That summer, Pat filled the barrel with maple syrup and waited. What they discovered, six months later, was a syrup imbued with a beguiling bourbon essence—oaky vanilla notes soaring on a wave of maple. Soon after, Back Creek Farms began barrel-aging syrup in bourbon, rye, and whiskey barrels, also from Reservoir Distillery. Most recently, they aged syrup in rum barrels from Vitae Spirits in Charlottesville before sending the barrels back to the distillery for another round of rum.

 The Lowrys have also started infusing syrups with flavors like ginger, chili pepper, and cardamom, using a heating process to impart the flavors into each batch. For their Spiced Elderberry Maple Syrup, Pat and Valerie collect native elderberries and blend them with cinnamon and ginger for a nuanced syrup that’s earthy and tart.

Valerie had a hunch that selling barrel-aged and flavored syrups would mean growth for Back Creek Farms, and she was right. By 2018, Back Creek Farms was selling a record level of syrup. They expanded their tent at the Maple Festival, and crowds waited in a winding line outside the tent for a chance to pocket their own bottles. When their own syrup was no longer plentiful enough to meet the demand, they began buying syrup from other Highland County sugar houses. “The syrup down here just has a maple-y mildness to it,” Valerie explains. You won’t find the distinct earthy terroir of the region in syrup from other places, so Back Creek Farms sources exclusively from local sellers.

And although the Highland County Maple Festival—originally scheduled for two weekends this March—has been canceled because of the pandemic, the maple won’t stop flowing. All around Highland County, if there’s steam coming out of a sugar house, it acts as a kind of smoke signal, alerting neighbors that there’s a batch of syrup boiling and all are welcome.

“They know they will be greeted with a warm building and that amazing aroma,” says Valerie. At Back Creek Farms, folks drop by all day, sharing stories and cups of coffee sweetened with maple sugar water—a leisurely moment during a busy time, and a sweet tradition the Lowrys have been a part of for 20 years.

Now in their late 60s, the Lowrys are ready to find the next generation of syrup makers who can take over Back Creek Farms and see it into its next phase. “We’re both ready to pass this on to someone younger who’s willing to work hard,” Valerie says, “because it does take a lot of work.” They’re hoping to find someone who will keep the steam pouring out of their well-loved sugar house. Valerie and Pat, who had families and careers of their own before marrying in 2001 and creating Back Creek Farms LLC in 2007, see Back Creek Farms much like a child they’ve raised together, “with all the mistakes and joys along the way,” Valerie says. “And just like a child, it is now time to let it go, but we also want it to enjoy a happy, healthy future.”