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Welcome to the
Willow Creek Sugarhouse,LLC
 East Kingston, New Hampshire. 

If you see steam we're makin' syrup.
Please stop in and taste warm fresh maple syrup straight out of the evaporator.

My name is Brad Rice, I am a chef by trade and I have a love for the outdoors.  With that combination making maple syrup is perfect for me.  I also get a chance to get out of the house in late winter when cabin fever is at its worst. 

The spring of 2009 was my first season of making pure New Hampshire maple syrup.  I had 25 taps and made several gallons of wonderful amber gold.  The sap was boiled on my  backyard rig with a roasting pan on cement blocks.  It was then I realized I had been bitten by the maple bug and fell in love with the process.  

The following summer I started out building a shed and came across an evaporator and my plans changed just a bit.  I decided to make my shed a little bigger and add on a few more taps.  The end result was a beautiful sugarhouse, a Patrick Phaneuf 2'x6' Stainless Steel drop flue evaporator and about 300 taps for the 2010 season. 

Although being outside is nice, it is nicer being in a warm dry sugarhouse making about 1 gallon of syrup per hour, instead of standing in the mud and making 1 gallon of syrup in about 8 hours.  

Approximately 250 of the taps run on about 3800 feet of tubing that is hooked up to a vacuum pump that gently helps persuade the sap out of the tree and drain into tanks located just behind the sugarhouse.  The remainder of the taps are on buckets and some tubing without vacuum.  That sap must be collected each day and brought back to the sugarhouse.