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Plumbers hooked up a sophisticated network of piping, leading from the silos to the new bottling room. Bottling machines arrived that were much like the machines at Maple Grove. Running at top capacity they would be able to fill eighty quarts per minute. In the basement a plumber and maple syrup producer named Jack Fuller installed an air-conditioning system that would lower the temperature to 40°.
    One Saturday morning when the building was near completion Bruce gave me a tour of this basement. As we approached, he clapped his hands to show how the motion-sensitive and energy-efficient LED lighting system performed. We walked down a ramp into the cooler, the “NewCooler,” as this would be called. (There was also an “Old Cooler” and a “Middle Cooler.”) The New Cooler was 100 feet wide and 210 feet long; if you took into account the 14-foot ceilings, the New Cooler was a 294,000-cubic-foot refrigerator. You could have played a hockey game in that basement and had room for bleachers.
    “We will be able to store eight million pounds of syrup here,” Bruce said. “About sixteen thousand drums.”
    Eight million pounds of syrup. The US crop in 2010 was 20 million pounds. Therefore, in this basement Bruce would be able to store more than a third of the syrup made in the United States in 2010. He could have stored one-fourth of the greater 2011 crop. But Bruce would not be storing just US syrup in the New Cooler; about half would come from Canada. The retail value of 8 million pounds of syrup at $55 per gallon would be $80 million.
    At this point Bruce couldn’t afford to buy 8 million pounds of syrup, but he intended to grow into his new basement. “I will be able to fill this cooler in about five years,” he said. “That is, if the bank will give me more gas.” That was how he saw himself, as an engine running on the gasoline of money.
    Arnold Coombs was also driving the construction of the new building. Arnold wanted to increase sales by twenty-five percent a year, from his $40 million in sales in 2010. Bruce’s job was to provide the syrup, in ever-increasing quantities.

    B RUCE TOOK OUT a short-term loan, seven years in duration, because he wanted to pay the building off as soon as possible.He had turned sixty in 2010. “My retirement will be spent paying for this new building,” he said, though actually the loan would be paid by the time he was sixty-seven. Time was a factor, though. “The future is my biggest problem,” he said. What he meant was that he didn’t have offspring coming into the business, neither of his two kids was interested, and he had no hard plan for what would happen to the company should something happen to him. “Fifty people would be looking for something to do,” he said. Not that he hadn’t been thinking about the succession problem; in 2010 he had hired a consultant from the business school at the University of Vermont to come in and examine the company regarding the matter of succession. She determined that Bruce, as the buyer of syrup in the field, was the one irreplaceable part.
    He put up this new building during a recession. Bruce thought it was an advantageous time to build because construction companies would make low bids to get the work. There were those who disagreed with his decision. For his family members who lived nearby, the new building meant an ultimate departure from the kind of family farm Bascom’s had once been. They also wondered what would happen should Bruce depart. He got several requests from relatives for options on land, should he pass away. Bruce ignored them. His accountant said he should not take a risk on a building project at this time, but Bruce dismissed that advice on the belief that accountants were, by nature, overly cautious.
    For a while it looked like the accountant was right. Bascom’s struggled during the summer of 2010 and in July, for the first time in many years, lost money. Bruce had developeda large enterprise with equally