Where to Celebrate Maple Sugaring Season in New England

Maple syrup season is a special time in New England. Also known as maple sugaring season, it’s the period when the nights freeze and the days thaw, causing lightly sugary tree sap to run. “That’s important to our people as a first sign of spring, a new beginning,” says Lorén Spears, an enrolled member of the Narragansett tribe and the executive director of the Tomaquag Museum in Exeter, Rhode Island. One of the annual 13 Thanksgivings that mark a reciprocal life with nature, it meant a sweet harvest for Indigenous tribes after surviving another hard winter living primarily off stored food.

Today, it still means the arrival of sweet treats for locals and visitors who can tour farms throughout New England — typically from February through April, although climate change is affecting the season, shifting it earlier or shortening it. Here’s where to learn how sugarhouses or sugar shacks turn maple sap into maple syrup and, most importantly, taste the delicious results.

What is maple syrup?

For thousands of years, Native peoples in the region have been collecting what they call sweet water, particularly from the sugar maple, whose sap has a high sugar content and therefore turns to syrup more easily than that of other trees. In the past, Spears says, the spouts hammered into the trees would be carved of stone or bone, and the liquid would drip into a makuk, a watertight container woven of birch bark. The sap would get heated over a fire in a shallow wooden trough. As water evaporated, the sugar would condense into maple syrup, then grainy maple sugar, then glass-like maple candy, providing a rare source of natural sweetener that was easy to travel with.

European colonizers adopted this practice, eventually turning it into a big business and modernizing it with metal spouts and troughs, plastic buckets, and new forms of heat. Overall, though, the process remains the same: cooking down at least 40 gallons of sap for hours to produce a gallon of syrup, which explains the relatively high cost. It’s laborious, but the sight and smell of maple steam billowing inside a sugar shack is sweet indeed, and there’s nothing quite like trying the final product in the woods where it was born. Here's a state by state guide to maple season in New England.

Maine

Maple syrup is “a way of life here in New England and an incredibly versatile and precious ingredient,” says Jasper Ludwig, co-owner of The Alna Store in Alna, Maine. This was the first state to host an annual maple weekend to promote its sugarhouses, now standard practice in maple-producing states.

Ludwig uses an uncommon type of maple syrup from Treehouse Brand Maple Syrup. The Auburn farm taps black maple trees instead of sugar maples and boils the sap in a must-see sugar shack: a treehouse that looks like a huge locomotive steam engine. The black maple syrup shines year-round atop The Alna Store’s Maine blueberry pancakes and in a sea salt maple latte with Tandem Coffee Roasters espresso from Portland.

Temple Tappers makes another unusual syrup that you can order online: tangy birch syrup, a gallon of which takes 120 gallons of sap to make during a tapping season that lasts less than a month.

Vermont

More than half the country’s maple syrup comes from the Green Mountain State — more than 3,000 sugarhouses produced over 3 million gallons in 2024, and you can visit many during Vermont Maple Open House Weekend, March 22-23. The state that produces the most maple syrup showcases it to lush effect in its famous maple creemee, soft serve ice cream made with maple syrup and a higher milk fat content than normal. Try one of the best examples at the longstanding Morse Farm Maple Sugarworks in Montpelier.

For an even simpler refreshment, you can also find cartons of Drink Simple maple water, which is another name for straight maple sap, packaged in St. Albans and available at many grocery stores. Of course, the beloved syrup makes its way into countless other beverages as well, such as No 14 Bourbon from Vermont Spirits Distilling Co., a well-balanced whiskey finished with syrup. Boston Harbor Hotel’s sultry Dark Bar (formerly called Rowes Wharf Bar) has its own select barrel — try a pour simply over ice, as the maple lends a hint of sweetness and spice that practically makes it an Old Fashioned.

Connecticut

While Rhode Island’s Tomaquag Museum isn’t currently hosting in-person maple sugaring activities, Lorén Spears recommends checking out the neighboring Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, which owns Foxwoods Resort Casino in Mashantucket, Connecticut. The Mashantucket Sugar Shack sells its own syrup and sometimes hosts public events with educational tours and tastings.

The Cottage Westport restaurant is celebrating its 10th anniversary by bringing back some fan favorites, including Maple Bacon & Eggs: soft eggs served in the shell along with candied bacon, robiola fonduta, brioche, and wood-fired maple syrup from Zadie’s Farm in Weston. Chef Brian Lewis created the dish for Martha Stewart using Ancona eggs from her nearby farm while he was working at Richard Gere's Bedford Post Inn in Bedford, New York, and he brought the star-studded signature dish along when he opened his own place. Lewis recommends learning more about maple sugaring at Ambler Farm’s family-friendly Maple Sugaring Open House in Wilton on March 8.

New Hampshire

Top of the Ridge Farm Bed & Breakfast in New Durham, New Hampshire, offers maple-infused baked goods like cookies or scones in the snack bar during New Hampshire Maple Month in March. Co-owner Tatiana Michelizza also recommends visiting Seabrisket Bakery in Brookfield, about a 30-minute drive away, where visitors can ride through the sugarbush on a Kubota tractor “to get up close and personal with sugar trees.” The comprehensive NH Maple Experience at The Rocks in Bethlehem also features a tractor ride as well as a horse-drawn wagon ride and a visit to the NH Maple Museum.

In North Woodstock, Fadden’s General Store & Maple Sugarhouse is an operation dating back to the 18th century that also houses a maple museum. Generational owner James Fadden says to look out for his maple syrup in seasonal beers made by Twin Barns Brewing Company and Woodstock Inn Brewery.

Massachusetts

Visit Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge during Maple Days, February 19-March 9, to experience a historical reenactment of the early 19th-century sugaring-off process. Marc Sheehan, owner of Northern Spy restaurant in Canton, Massachusetts, says the surprising abolitionist history of maple syrup was one of the reasons he started studying the history of New England food.

In letters he found between then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush, who was commissioned to study the production of maple syrup, “Rush used the opportunity to encourage Jefferson and the new U.S. federal government to exploit its maple sugaring resources to outcompete sugar plantations in the Caribbean and therefore bring an end to slavery as a means of sugar production,” he says. For Northern Spy, Sheehan collects maple sap from Maple Jack in Westwood, Massachusetts, and reduces it himself to control the sweetness and viscosity of the syrup for anything from maple bacon breakfast sausage to maple vinegar to sticky maple pudding, which never leaves the dessert menu.

Red Apple Farm is famous for its apple cider doughnuts, which in March get a maple glaze at the Phillipston, Massachusetts farm and at a stall at Boston Public Market. Fifth-generation owner Al Rose also operates Bullock Lodge at skiing destination Wachusett Mountain, where you can try maple syrup heated to the softball stage of thickness drizzled on snow on a popsicle stick, a traditional treat called sugar on snow, or syrup on vanilla ice cream, called a sugar shack.

Rhode Island

Coggeshall Farm Museum, in partnership with Old Sturbridge Village, interprets daily life on a salt marsh farm from the late 18th century. At its Maple Sugaring Days (February 22-23 and March 1-2), visitors can see a rustic version of the tradition, including the carving of wooden spiles for tapping the trees.

Rhode Island is famous for its johnnycakes, cornmeal pancakes that can be thick (South County) or thin (Newport County style) depending on the region. Lorén Spears of the Tomaquag Museum says they come from the Native American journey cake, sweetened with maple syrup and so named because “you could take it on a journey with you in your pouch, add dried fruits, nuts, proteins, and end up with a complete meal to go.” Try crispy johnnycakes topped with maple syrup at Jigger’s Diner in East Greenwich.