♪ ♪ >>> Well, winters in Vermont are long.

I've lived here for more than half my life, and I'm still not used to them.

You know, there's snow on the ground for six months of the year.

And we sort of huddle up towards the end, you know?

It's just that magical transition time of rebirth and coming out with sugar, right.

This is the experience that I love to share.

This is why I do what I do, is to share that essential experience.

Start my day by checking the weather, checking my emails, having some coffee.

Go gather the sap, bring it back in the truck.

All right, so, these are some nice antique buckets that I've inherited from generations of sugar makers here at Landgrove.

Some of these are from the 1920s, which is really sort of a really cool thing about using some of this older equipment.

Combine that with some modern technology.

We're going to go hang some buckets.

So, here we are.

This is a really special piece of land that's near our house, near our relatives' house.

Been part of Landgrove family tradition for a long time.

But, basically, at the end of winter, this tree has stored some energy in the form of carbohydrates in its roots, and that's like a really simple sugar that comes up the tree on warm days.

And then it freezes inside the tree and comes down the tree on the next warm day.

So, the sap is flowing in two directions, and we capture just a little bit of that.

So, going to drill that hole about an inch into the outer white wood of the tree, the sap wood.

People imagine something thick like pine sap, and they think of maple syrup, but maple sap is like water.

Only 2% sugar and the rest of it's water.

One of my personal traditions when I tap a tree and see the sap flow, I yell out "we got a runner!"

So, you'll hear us on tapping day, all the kids and me are shouting like lunatics like that, then I hug the tree, because I'm a hippie, to give back the love this tree is giving me.

A lot of maple syrup documentaries you're not going to see that clownery, but that what makes Sugar Bob sweet.

It's not clownery either.

It's respect.

My manly hammer.

You'll see that sap's going to flow right out of there pretty soon.

Can catch that.

It's just magical, mother nature's gift.

And that's a pretty good flow right there.

That's a brilliant little thing.

That's the sound of spring, if you can catch that ping, ping, ping.

Put a little lid on that bucket.

So, we're often out in the very end of February hanging these buckets and putting our lines up.

And then the sap will flow until about the second week of April.

So, it's about six weeks there, you know, that we start thigh deep in snow in snow shoes and finish in our sneakers.

Really, it's a transition time of year.

Early spring, mud on the roads, running water, and skiers in tank tops.

Shoots start to come out of the ground.

Beginning of the season, start hearing tree frogs and peepers.

The waking up of life after a long, hard winter.

And the best part is, it's sugar that we're making.

We're not harvesting potatoes or wine or grapes.

It's sugar, that's what makes the magic happen.

That's why I'm Sugar Bob.

♪ I became a full-time sugarmaker by making maple products year round out of the syrup we harvest during this time of the year.

I take a lot of these business accelerator courses and they make you focus on what problem do you solve?

I'm not solving a problem.

Problem isn't that people are hungry and they need syrup.

The problem is people want to know where their food comes from.

All right.

Okay.

These are some buckets that we tapped previously.

Whether has been perfect.

Let's find out what we have here.

This bucket has been running -- the sap has been running into this bucket for, I don't know, 20 or 36 hours.

This is our New England heritage sweetener.

Right, doesn't come from away across the sea or even from the south.

In this forest that we're standing in actually stretches from Maine to Michigan, right, from Quebec all the way down to, you know, West Virginia, Virginia, probably half of the northern tier of that forest is maple or maple related species.

So, it's like water, right, not sticky.

But there is sugar in it.

Just the best drink ever.

Fresh out of the tree like that.

Minerals, and that maple flavor.

No one is able to really say what makes it maple-y flavor.

Can't be duplicated, though, No, sir.

So, this tank holds 325 gallons of sap.

Looks like we're about halfway there right now.

Boiling sap is my favorite part, down in the sugar house.

That's when you take this great sap and turn it into the syrup, right.

When the kids come and try the sap, that's delicious.

But when they try the syrup, oh, my goodness.

It's special.

Never know who's going to show up.

People see the steam rising from the side of the road, put a little sign out that says sugar house is open.

You see a car come down, could be your best friend or could be a friend only during sugaring season.

That's sort of chaos and mystery of who are you going to see and what's going to happen.

Pretty special to me.

Bricks hot, crowd fired up, woof, woof, let's make some sugar!

We'll keep going until dark, right.

People bring food, people bring snacks, been making syrup, filtering it, bottle it up, people take some home.

It's just going to be the greatest time.

♪ I love to connect people with the woods, their food, and each other.

You know, I'm a big personality.

Whether it's Sugar Bob this, Sugar Bob that, but really I just want to be a facilitator for us getting together and being together, right.

Our sugar house is open to everybody, all shapes and sizes, even all political parts that was spectrum.

People just love to be part of the magic of getting the sugar, watching it turn into delicious products, and cooking with them and sharing them and watching our success, because our success drives everyone's success.

I probably focus too much on the emotional parts of my business as opposed to the Excel spreadsheet parts of my business, you know.

I care a lot about making a lot of syrup, but I care more about who I make it with.

And I care a lot about my QuickBooks online accounting system, but I care more about the why I do the things that I do.

And, so, the balance of those two is sort of the thread that we knit together this life that we love.

Oh, boy, that was so cheesy.

That's definitely not going to go in the final cut.

♪ It likes to keep his fire engine clean.

It's a clean machine.

Do, do, do, do, do.

♪ Sugar Bob in the sugar house with his sugaring ♪ ♪ He polishes the vaporator now ♪ ♪ People like to come and go but he says hello ♪ ♪ You know I can pull off my thumb?

Ahhhh!

Now I'm going to start telling dad jokes.

Opening the world of possibilities in all natural sweeteners.

♪ I hear you knocking ♪ But you can't come in ♪ Trying to think of another dad joke.

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