Chas Smith and Nikita Salmon’s families have been in Vermont for eight generations, and throughout much of that time, they’ve been producing maple sap drinks as a hobby; three years ago these two cousins decided it was time to turn their family hobby into a family business.

Sap! Maple is now sold in over one thousand stores throughout New England, and as far south as New York City. “During the maple season, it’s common for people to drink maple sap straight from the maple trees,” says Salmon. “Chas and I decided to put a twist on this drink that our family — and so many Vermonters — know so well.”

Concentrating the sap slightly brings out more of the natural sweetness, while also increasing the nutrient profile of the products. Adding carbonation to the drink simply elevates the tasting experience even further.

“While it’s easy today to find seltzers that are low in sugar and calories, and sodas that have ‘better for you’ ingredients, none of these product have any tangible health benefits, and are in fact mostly negative for human health,” Smith says. Maple sap, however, is a superfood, thanks to its antioxidant and nutrient properties, which makes Sap! the first carbonated soft drink products that actually can make you healthier.

The Sap! team has been working with the University of Vermont, Cornell University, and other academic researchers to study maple sap, thanks to a Value-Added Producer Grant from the USDA. They expect more research to be released in the coming years linking maple sap to positively impacting human health.

Beyond the initial Maple Sap! soda and seltzer products, the company has recently expanded into birch tree products as well and are now offering a Birch Sap! sparkling water. “There’s an abundance of birch trees in Vermont. Some people say there are actually more birch trees than maple trees in the state,” says Salmon. “What we saw was an untapped potential to produce one of nature’s healthiest natural products.”

Overseeing the production process.

Despite plans to expand the availability of the product further to New York and the Mid-Atlantic in 2018, Sap! remains committed to sustainable production, pledging 1 percent of total revenue each year to organizations involved in the working forest and regenerative agriculture space. “The better we do, the better our sap producers do, the more trees stay productive, and consumers get healthier beverage options,” Salmon says.

Chas Smith and Nikita Salmon – Sap! Maple
Burlington, Vermont
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Top image: Sap! Maple. All photos courtesy by Homer Horowitz.

The post Untapped Potential appeared first on Take Magazine.

Charley Reynolds makes some serious bongs. The Burlington, Vermont glassblower crafts pipes of varied colors and forms with such virtuosity it’s hard to decide if his work would be better suited for getting people high out of their minds or sitting in the pristine displays of an art gallery. He’s a testament to the value of following your passion: A two-week glassblowing internship ignited his interest in 2006 while he attended boarding school, and today he makes a living selling his smokeware.

Pipe-making’s countercultural nature kept discussions with his family stiff in the early days. “Being a 16-year-old, it’s a pretty difficult question to ask your mom ‘Can I make pipes?’” Reynolds says in retrospect. “For many years we really didn’t talk about what I was making.” He gained some major experience during an eight month stint at The Bern Gallery after starting a biology degree at the University of Vermont. He took a year off from school to hone his craft and rented a room above Nectar’s, the infamous bar in Burlington where Phish first played.

Since January 2013, he’s been glassblowing full-time. He took a four and half month period to travel and learn the industry landscape, sometimes sleeping in his Jetta station wagon, sometimes crashing with bong-making confidants. His tour took him from Vermont to Maine, Massachusetts, and New York (a glass studio in the basement of a major Manhattan apartment building stands out), and continued to New Jersey, North Carolina, and Florida.

Photo courtesy of Charley Reynolds

A workhorse mentality and desire to stay out of his comfort zone led Reynolds to develop his signature “plaidicello,” a reference to an Italian glass technique called the Reticello. He uses glass made with two percent depleted uranium, creating unique plaid patterns that come alive under a blacklight. “If anyone sees it, they’ll say that’s a Charley Reynolds piece,” he says. “If anyone tries to copy it, a lot people who are customers will actually defend me and contact them and tell them that they’re copying my work.”

Steady orders keep Reynolds making a lot of the same designs regularly, which can be tiresome. “It easily becomes a monotonous job where every day you make the exact same thing in the same style, and maybe all you do is change the color. Spending eight hours or so doing something like that drains your spirit. I think that’s why one of the most important things you can do in glass or any style of art is experiment.” Some of his new ideas include embedding tree patterns or the Vermont skyline in glass.

Collaboration between Reynolds and KGB Glass. Image courtesy of Charley Reynolds

Reynolds has built a sturdy pipe-making and selling network and a near 7,500-strong following on Instagram, where he conducts most of his business. “It’s the closest thing to a gallery that’s right on your phone,” he says. Putting his work on view in the vastness of social media has proven its worth. By 2016, he could sell a bong for $1,000 to $1,400 retail. Now some of his pieces pull $2,500 from store shelves. He sells his work all over New England and across the country, and recently received an inquiry from a smoke shop he admires in the United Kingdom.

Relationship-building remains a huge boost for Reynolds’ career. “The more traveling you do, the more shops you get to know, all the sudden a shop will see your work and say, ‘I’ve never seen it before, I love your idea, how can I get some?’”

Charley Reynolds–Glassblower
Burlington, Vermont
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Top image: Collaboration between Charley Reynolds and Danny Camp Glass, photo editing by Chandler Ellis

The post High Art appeared first on Take Magazine.

“I’m 19,” says Dylan Rhode, one of the three frontmen of Flower Shop, a music and arts collective based in Portland, Maine. Dylan drifted around New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey through his upbringing, finally settling down in the Greater Portland area he now calls home. “It all kind of happened organically,” says Rhode, who goes by the moniker Monk, of the advent of Flower Shop. “We didn’t have anything else to do except get in trouble and do stupid shit, so turning this common interest into a business seemed like the most productive use of our passion.” In nine months, that passion has flourished into a hip-hop collective, studded with rappers, vocal artists, producers, videographers, beat-smiths, and musical magicians—most of them under 21—who are pushing out unique content by the day. A quick visit to their Soundcloud gives a sense of their musical range.

Mhon Griot & Monk | Photo by Justin Hardesty

Passion doesn’t always express itself in a pleasant way. “It’s different up here,” Monk explains. “It’s cold, everyone has seasonal depression, and the summer is fleeting. The summer is almost like a feeling as opposed to a time. It’s a different culture—everyone is collectively sad. We’re trying to bring the essence of that culture to our music.” Since August of last year, Monk and the other two frontmen, Trevor Tucker (THT) and Mhondoro Richards (Mhon Griot), have been pushing out masterful products of visionary talent steeped in sadness. However, this tripod of hip-hop wunderkinds couldn’t stand without a thriving community of audiovisual colleagues to lift them out of the perpetual sludge. The most powerful manifestation of that is their first music video for their track, FACES, which features the work of many talented collaborators.

The concept for the music video was dreamt of and engineered by Flower Shop visual artists, Dillan Hodak and Charlie ‘Buckets’ Mayforth. The Champlain College senior and SCAD graduate, respectively, pursued futures in visual media and connected with the collective through Flower Shop’s multi-talented booking manager and graphic designer, Tim Dubois. “They really liked the song and we wanted to do a project together,” says Monk. “They have all the equipment and happen to be incredibly nice at what they do.”

The Flower Shop crew whipped up an audiovisual gem in a single day. “One of our sets was in Tim’s little Burlington apartment. We had so many kids jumping up and down in the room with all this heavy equipment, the downstairs neighbors came up and said their ceiling was flexing in. They said, ‘The song’s really cool, but we’re afraid you’re going to collapse our ceiling!'” says Monk. While they claim the video was “thrown together,” the polished outcome can only be credited to expert work. Note the spray-paint jumpsuits that make appearances throughout the video, created late night on a whim by Mayforth. Talk about whacking it out of the park on your first try.

THT | Photo by Justin Hardesty

The Flower Shop members are not without pleasure nor plight. “Living in Maine has shaped my art because people think that a rapper has to come from a hard place and a crooked, dangerous city,” THT says, “and when people hear about rappers from Maine, they think the worst. They call us soft, but it doesn’t mean a thing—we all have been through a lot. But ah well, that’s just another person we have to prove wrong.”

FACES | Still shot by Dillan Hodak

Flower Shop – Music and Arts Collective
Portland, Maine
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Monk
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THT
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Mhon Griot
Soundcloud
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The post Maine’s Hip Hop Flower Shop appeared first on Take Magazine.