The sugar rush A memoir of wild dreams, budding bromance, and making maple syrup

Gregg documents his success harvesting maple syrup on his upstate New York acreage, with an account of the physical and mental toll it took on him and his business partner, Bert, that belies mere output statistics. Gregg wound up in midlife living alone with a cat and a thousand maple trees. He and Bert, both amateurs, strove for the same sort of yield from their syrup enterprise achieved by large commercial enterprises. Readers envisioning little tubes thrust into trees and cute pails hanging from them may be disappointed to learn modern syrup making requires yards of plastic tubing connected to vacuum pumps that keep the sap flowing (so long as they aren't sabotaged by squirrels and other varmints). Gregg relates the duo's travails and introduces a cast of obsessively dedicated farmers ever willing to help one another when difficulties arise, in a text brimming with rowdy expletives. Readers far beyond the author's northeast community will appreciate farmers' devotion to the craft--and never want to pour anything but the genuine article on their pancakes again.

Gregg's gleeful debut recounts how he and his best friend, Bert Jones, got into the maple syrup business. The two became friends after meeting in a poker league and starting a "seven-piece dad band" in Upstate New York. In 2013, they decided to build a sugarhouse on Gregg's property, which straddles the Vermont state line, and convert tree sap to syrup as a hobby. Though they produced just under three pounds of syrup in their best year, Gregg decided in January 2022 that he wanted to "hold head high at the urinal" beside Vermont's commercial syrup producers, who average five pounds per year. Jones jumped at the idea, and together, the men fought squirrels, equipment mishaps, and inclement weather as they spent the winter and early spring trying to meet their benchmark. Gregg's effortless humor lifts the proceedings as he describes reactions from mystified family members and gently ribs his partner ("Bert tends to move at the velocity of plate tectonics"). Readers will quickly develop a taste for this. (July)