Craig Line, a retired AP photographer, has been sugaring for 44 years. His current sugarhouse is just behind his home at Kent Corners, where he taps about 1000 trees and makes maple syrup the way it’s been made for well over a century: on a wood-fired evaporator (bought used) in an unheated, sunlit sugarhouse, drawing off slowly, then using gravity filtration and near-immediate bottling. It makes for some long days and long nights. “If this were a year-round thing, I would’ve quit long ago,” he says. But it isn’t and so he hasn’t.
Friends stop by to visit and to help, and for those who really pitch in, Line pulls out a hidden bottle of Maker’s Mark, and dribbles a healthy layer of the bourbon on top of a small testing bottle half-filled with hot, freshly-drawn-off maple syrup, to create a delectable “maple shot.”
Maybe it won’t be such a long night after all.
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