Paul Zononi was shocked to find that when he started tapping trees for the 2025 sugaring season at Paul’s Sugar House in Williamsburg, the sap came at a trickle — and with only half of its typical sugar content.

“I’ve been doing this over 50 years and I can’t remember another time I’ve seen this,” said Zononi, a first-generation sugar maker who has been making maple syrup since he was 8 years old.

His current operation has about 3,300 taps, which typically produces around 1,400 gallons of syrup a year. But this year, things have been off to a strange start.

Usually, it takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, and that sap hovers around a sugar content of roughly 2%. But recently, Zononi has been seeing sugar contents closer to 1%, meaning it takes double the amount of sap — about 80 gallons — to make just one gallon of syrup.

“It’s double the labor, double the time, double the sap for the same amount of syrup,” he said.

Not only that, but Zononi’s sap has been running slower than usual, and because some of his trees look particularly unhealthy this year, he isn’t even tapping all of them.

Zononi isn’t the only one who has seen some different trends in his sap this year. Steve’s Sugar Shack in Westhampton and North Hadley Sugar Shack in Hadley have seen the change as well — a slower flow of sap and about a 1% sugar content where usually there is about a 2% sugar content.

Steve Holt of Steve’s Sugar Shack said that, while it varies from year to year, he had produced 161 gallons of syrup by this time last year, and has currently produced 24 gallons this year.

While the restaurant side of Holt’s business has still been booming, he said more syrup will be needed, because his guests go through 8 gallons of syrup each week even though the restaurant is only open two days per week.

Holt said he assumes the recent drought conditions in the region have something to do with this change in sap trends. He noted that this year, the leaves “turned brown and fell off early.”

“The trees basically shut down early,” he said, meaning they had less time to photosynthesize and make sugar.

Zononi also has a few theories as to why his sap harvest might be struggling this year, and they have to do with changing weather patterns. Namely, rain early in the season and pervasive drought conditions may have impacted the health of his trees, and the amount of time they had to photosynthesize and create syrup. This pattern of weather may also be the culprit for a fungus that appeared on the leaves, giving them a spotty appearance and limiting the amount of green surface area where the leaves could take in sunlight for photosynthesis.

Zononi also noted the unpredictable temperatures that have been at play this winter. For a good syrup season, sap has to freeze at night and thaw completely in the morning for optimal flow. But with some of the warm spells and cold snaps that have touched the region on and off for months, Zononi said that cycle may have been disturbed, and believes the ground and the trees might still be a bit too cold for a good sap flow.

Holt had a similar theory for what has been at work in his own trees.

“That freeze-thaw cycle hasn’t been happening contiguously, so sap hasn’t been flowing as well,” he explained.

But things may be looking up as the weather warms. At North Hadley Sugar Shack, Joe Boisvert said sap has started to flow more regularly in the past few days, and sugar contents are on the rise.

“We knew that was going to happen going into this year because the trees were frozen solid, you have frost on the ground,” he said of the initially slow sap flow and low sugar content.

While this year has been different, Boisvert didn’t express concern. Rather, he sees this year’s weather patterns as a return to “a traditional New England winter,” and a more traditional sap harvesting season, which he said used to have an early March start and run through about mid-April.

In the past few years though, Boisvert said he has started harvesting as early as January because of changing weather patterns. But this year, he chalks up the change to the freezing weather conditions.

“These poor trees were just frozen solid,” he said. “Sap is coming in, sugar content is going back up, and we’re going to be busy hopefully through April.”

Boisvert said that based on his past experience, it’s “too early right now to be alarmed about anything.” He plans to spend the weekend boiling all of the sap that has begun flowing in the past few days.

Zononi also reported that sugar contents have begun to rise in his sap harvests as of Thursday as well.

Alexa Lewis can be reached at alewis@gazettenet.com.