Mad About Maple: Ben’s Sugar Shack in Temple, New Hampshire

In 1993, when he was 5 years old, Ben Fisk took a field trip to a sugarhouse with his Temple, New Hampshire, preschool class. It’s not hard to imagine the excitement of these little kids, taking their first deep dive into the alchemy that winds up as a delicious puddle on pancakes. And it’s easy to conjure their delight in coming in from the cold and being enveloped in clouds of moist, fragrant steam. To picture the sticky fun of sampling different grades, from light to dark; the magic of sugar on snow; the sugar high that followed. Maybe they got to take samples home. Maybe they thought a little harder about what they were pouring onto their pancakes the next time.

What’s less predictable is obsession. Passion. Because at the age of 5, Ben Fisk could not stop talking about syrup. He’s a fifth-generation maple maker, so it was only natural that his dad knew how to make it and his grandparents had the tools to get him started. “We borrowed 13 sap buckets from my grandfather and asked the neighbor if we could tap their trees,” he says. That year he produced less than a gallon, but he admits he talked about it “nonstop.” For a Christmas present, his parents bought him an evaporator. Now he was 6.

Fisk’s genial bearded face, outdoorsy demeanor, and ready laugh belie the seeds of intensity and focus that were surely there even three decades ago. When he thinks back on what hooked him about sugaring, he confesses, “I was so young, I don’t remember all of it, but it was probably the process.” Then he grins. “It’s an open flame! You’re getting to play with fire! The sap is coming out of trees! It was all interesting to me.”

Back then, everyone in the area knew about the whiz kid from Temple, the eventual owner and founder of Ben’s Sugar Shack. After that first year, he tapped 200 more trees, and then kept adding. In the summer, he sold lemonade and maple syrup outside the Temple Store, in the center of this small, historic town. His dad built a sugarhouse that still sits on the family property. Someone had to drive him around to collect the sap, until he was old enough to get his own license. And still he kept adding trees. You’d read about him in the local papers, charting his growth by taps and awards, rather than years. When he was 15, he won the coveted Carlisle award from the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association for the best maple syrup in the state—and was the youngest ever to win.

He hit the big time when he launched his first website in 2003 and the Associated Press got wind of it. “They wrote this great article, everyone published it, and our website blew up,” Fisk remembers gleefully. “I had to take a few days off from school to fill the orders that came pouring in.” Which is funny, because he’d always told his teachers he was going to sell maple syrup for a living.

I should mention that right now it’s mid-February, and we are standing in the Maple Station Market, a handsome building on Route 101 in Temple that opened in December 2023. It houses Fisk’s sugaring operation, Ben’s Sugar Shack, along with a bustling country store and deli that keeps the maple theme front and center. He bought the original 15-acre property when he was in his mid-20s, but then it took years to get to this point.

Fisk boiled this morning and made 330 gallons of syrup; he’ll boil again later this afternoon and probably make another 330 gallons. He’s got sugarbushes scattered over five different towns, over 28,000 taps, all within an hour’s drive; blue tubing snakes through the surrounding woods like rugged spider webs, delivering precious drops to collection tanks. There are five guys working the woods in November, checking the lines and doing maintenance, and they start tapping the day after Christmas. It is literally his dream come true.

The waxing light of February feels like a New England miracle when it finally comes. By March, it’s incontrovertible, a fact. There are no dog days of winter, but if there were, they might be now, when we’re crawling toward spring. It’s all about the light, and change, and sap is a gravity-defying proof of this metamorphosis. Syrup feels like boiled light. We may be able to explain it scientifically, but it’s still one of earth’s happy mysteries. Why does it taste so good?

In the end, Fisk tells me, it’s about weather. If the 10-day forecast stays like this for the rest of the month, it will be a terrible season, he says. You have to have nights below freezing and days around 40 to 50 degrees. If all goes well, it’ll take 40 to 60 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup—that’s according to the signs handily posted along Fisk’s popular maple tours. A tree can produce more than a gallon of sap a day, there’s another tidbit. Ben Fisk knows as much as anyone about this ebb and flow.

He tells me he’s excited every day when he gets up. Sure, maple syrup may be the stuff of kids’ dreams, but it’s more than that, too. In the end, for him, it’s about being out in the woods. “You’re out there by yourself listening to the birds and the trees, looking at different things. The earth always grows in different ways. And you’re trying to figure out how to bring the sap out of the tree, this tiny drop of maple sap.”

It’s a unique job, he admits. The tree produces this one drop. And then Ben Fisk brings it home. bensmaplesyrup.com

Annie Graves

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