Mar 28, 2003 By Amanda Clegg For The 7 min read

INDIAN HEAD – Archie Miller of Indian Head sticks with family tradition when it comes to making maple sugar. More than 100 years ago, Miller’s great-grandfather tapped into the maple-sugar trees rooted in the Fayette County mountains found behind Miller’s stone house, located along Route 711.

This year, Miller’s maple-sugar season began on March 7. The season usually runs from January to April, said Miller, a 78-year-old retired coal miner, who produces the maple sugar as a hobby.

Miller’s friend, Bob Wingert of Scottdale, often helps his friend during the maple-sugar season.

A week into production, Miller and Wingert stood among the 150 maple-sugar trees on Miller’s property.

Overhead, naked branches wove a dense pattern against the sky. Patches of snow lingered on top of a blanket of soggy maple leaves. The leaves squished under the men’s work boots.

Maple-sugar trees grow to approximately 75 feet in height, the white-bearded Miller said.

When tapping, Miller uses a 7/16 drill bit to drill two inches into the tree.

Metal buckets, attached low to several trees, catch the clear sap dripping from spiles, metal values which are inserted into the drill hole so the sap can drip easily into the bucket.

“Tapping doesn’t hurt the tree,” Miller said. “But there’s a rule that you don’t tap more than 18 inches above or below an old tap or six inches to the right or left.”

Miller and Wingert, both men wearing baseball caps, tossed their knowledge of the maple-sugar trade back and forth as if they were kids playing catch.

“The hard work is gathering,” Miller said.

“February was too cold,” Wingert added. “The hillside had a foot of snow.”

“You need 20 degrees at night, a 40-degree thaw in the day,” Miller said.

“When the sugar water comes out the tree, it is two and two-quarters percent sugar,” Wingert said.

“Boiled in the pain it is 65 percent,” Miller said.

“You can hardly tell it has any sugar,” Wingert added. “You can drink it just like water.”

Miller walked over to a red Fourtrax Honda 300, and loaded the four-wheeler’s back end with plastic drums. Miller uses the four-wheeler to ride along the hillside and the drums to collect the contents of each bucket.

Wingert followed on foot. The two men poured the sap from the buckets through a funnel set inside the drums.

“You generally gather the sap, what would you say, once a day, Archie?” Wingert asked.

“Now, with the buckets you might do it twice a day, because with a steel bucket if you leave the water in overnight and it freezes it will burst your bucket,” Miller replied. “So, we have to turn ’em down during the night.”

After collecting the sap, Miller drove toward his two-story sugar shack, which sits on a plateau below the land where the maple-sugar trees grow. Miller and his son, Tim, built the shack with treated Hemlock seven years ago. The Miller family had two previous sugar shacks, but both shacks deteriorated, Alice Miller said.

In front of the sugar shack, planks of wood stacked atop each other snaked along the edge of the hill. Walk-in cooler hinges attach the shack’s front door to the building. An upside down horseshow is nailed above the door frame.

Inside the sugar shack, a bench, once a Chevrolet Corvair’s rear seat, juts from one side wall. Miller and his wife once belonged to a Corvair club. A blackboard hung above the bench lists the times Miller lit the fire and the sap’s boiling times and levels. The car’s front bucket seat, sitting in the corner formed by the rear seat and the shack’s front wall, faces a furnace. Above the furnace, Miller keeps track of the daily activities on a “Tribute to the Heroes of 9/11” calendar.

“A blend of coal and wood are used for fuel,” Wingert said. “Seventy-five percent is wood.”

The fire pit, behind the furnace wall, cradles a 16-inch deep, 30-inch wide, 7-foot long pan used for boiling the sap down. Steam from the bubbling sap billows through an opening in the sugar shack’s roof.

The sap must boil to a temperature of 219.5 degrees Fahrenheit, Wingert said.

“Whenever that comes to a boil, that’s when the foam – it looks like meringue on a lemon pie – comes up and the impurities are in that,” Miller said. “And you use a skimmer and put the foam in a bucket and throw it away. That’s the beginning of the cleansing cycle.” The sap is then placed in a lead-free finishing tank and heated by propane gas.

“One of the disadvantages of this pan method of making maple syrup is that you can’t get it much thinner than 3/8 of an inch on the bottom of your pan for fear of scorching,” Wingert said. “But by the same token, generally, it is not yet syrup. So, that’s the reason for having the finishing pan. Propane makes it possible to finish the syrup to the proper 11 pounds per gallon, the minimum weight for commercial-grade syrup.”

After the sap is poured into the finishing tank, a finishing agent is added, and the sap is run through a hand-operated filter press.

“We used to filter through flannel-filtering cones, but that was so dog gone slow that Archie bought a filter press which uses paper filters,” Wingert said. “That makes it go so much better.”

The filter press removes the “niter” and “nitty gritty,” Miller said.

“The boiling process creates this, you could call it sugar sand or niter, and if you don’t filter it out it settles to the bottom of your container,” Wingert said. “It doesn’t hurt a thing, but it isn’t very sightly, so you filter that out so it’s nice and clear.”

The syrup is then bottled, Miller explained.

“And whoever has the steadiest hand that day gets to bottle it,” Wingert said, smiling.

“And I put on the cap,” Miller added, laughing.

The capped bottle is then laid on its side, Miller said. “So that the syrup gets up in around the lid and seals it,” he said.

The bottled syrup is then transported to the house where Miller’s wife dates the syrup and attaches labels, which read “Pure Maple Syrup.” Miller said he gives away the bottles of syrup, which are worth $9 per bottle.

The family uses the maple syrup for flavoring in apple cobbler and apple pie, Alice Miller said.

She also uses the syrup to baste ham loaf and baked ham. “I use it in cereal about every morning,” Archie Miller said.

Miller and his wife, Alice, have been married for 59 years and have raised four children, Sandra Ulery of Youngwood, Jill Oplinger of Indian Head, Tim of Leisenring and Dan of Scottdale. Wingert, a retired executive of Penn Lines Service in Scottdale, and his wife, Lucille, raised three sons, Jeffrey, who lives in Ohio, and Gregg and Scott, who both live in Texas.

The two men met more than 15 years ago when they joined the same barbershop chorus.

The most maple syrup Miller ever produced in one season was 30 gallons. The least, he said, was the 22 gallons made last year.

Last year, Miller used a tubing system – a system often used by commercial bottlers – to collect the maple sugar. The tubing system works the sap into one tube, a direct line attached to a 300-gallon collection tank located inside the sugar shack. Cleaning the tubing equipment was “too much of a problem,” Miller said. Miller used the tube system for three years before returning to the original method.

“It wasn’t the old way,” Miller said. “It was a family tradition. And that’s why we’re doing it now – just for tradition.”