It's maple season for Benedictine monks

WESTON, Vt. - The gift shop of the Benedictine Monks of Weston Priory doesn't just sell compact discs and cassettes of their famous music. Shelves also are stocked with the monks' own maple syrup.

They began sugaring in Weston in 1954, the year after the priory was founded. Today, the monks place about 300 taps on maple trees on their property that borders the Green Mountain National Forest in central Vermont. The 13 monks at the priory bottle syrup in pint and half-pint plastic jugs with their own label. The syrup sells in their gift shop alongside their music: "Listen," "Wherever You Go," "Spirit Alive," "Go Up to the Mountain" and "So Full of Deep Joy." It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup, and the monks produce between 35 and 80 gallons of syrup, depending on the season. They own about 35 acres of sugar bush over three sites and alternate sugar bushes to allow the trees to rest for a few years between tappings. "We try to flow with nature rather than try to conquer it," said Benedictine Brother John Hammond. "It's not to squeeze as much out of it as we can but to encourage it to nourish us." The monks - who wear warm work clothes and hats while sugaring - have several small-scale operations like logging and farming. They begin their sugaring operation in late February or early March, and it usually lasts for a month to six weeks. They hope for warm days and cold nights to make the sap run; this year the weather has been too cold for a good run. Benedictine Brother Augustine Carroll drives a tractor or plow out to the sugar bush, and several monks and occasional visitors volunteer to help collect the sap from the metal buckets and pour it into a 325-gallon tank on an attached trailer. "It's great community-building," Brother John said. The sap is then transferred into the evaporator in the monks' sugar house, boiled, filtered three times, graded and bottled. There are four grades from "fancy" (the lightest) to grade B, a darker grade the monks add to apples in the fall to make "maple" butter. Throughout the boiling process on a recent winter day, Brother Augustine had to "draw off" some of the syrup from the evaporator to check its density. Brother John occasionally warmed his hands in the steam rising from the evaporator, saying "it's good for the arthritis." The monks also reserve a portion of the syrup for their own consumption. "We love it," said Brother John, who likes to see the finished product in jugs lined up and ready to go to the table or to the shop. Brother Augustine helps run the oil-fired evaporator in the sugar house attached to a large barn just up the road from the priory. What he likes best about working in the sugaring operation is the sweet smell from the sugar house as sap boils down to syrup and steam rolls up and out through a vent in the roof. But there's a special benefit to working in the operation, the two monks agreed with a smile: the taste test. "You have to be professional tasters in this business," said Brother John with a sparkle in his eye.

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Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops