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THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
1986 FOLKLIFE FESTIVAL
INTERVIEW WITH: Eddie Bramhall
INTERVIEWER: Al Lowman
DATE: August 2, 1986
PLACE: 1986 Folklife Festival
AL LOWMAN: This is Al Lo~man interviewing Eddie Bramhall ,
the syrup maker, from Devine, here at the Fifteenth Annual
Folklife Festival on the second of August 1986.
Eddie, when did you start this syrup making?
EDDIE BRN1HALL: Oh, here four or five years ago I learned
it from Jerry Young, he did it for years there in Devine
and he taught me. So when he got to where he didn ' t want to
do it any more they asked me to do it, SO I did. I've known
how to do it for quite some time.
L: Where did you learn how to do it?
B: Just from people, my mother--my mother ' s family,
rather--and then just people in Devine like 01' Jerry
Young, and a lot of them disciples of o. T. Baker that
Arnold Griffin had had all these old crafts going and they
teach ' em--they ' ll teach 'em to anybody that'll listen.
L: Yeah, right.
B: So I just learned it and I ' m going to plan some of them
BRAMHALL 2
old-time music things.
L: Well, you see, I really didn ' t know anybody was hardly
around any more that continued doing that sort of thing.
It's--
B: There's not much reason to do it because it ' s a lot
easier, a lot cheaper, to buy it in the store.
L: That ' s right. But is there any place else that you
know of in Texas where people are doin ' it for the hell of
it like they are in Devine?
B: Yeah. Right up north of New Braunfels there ' s a little
community--I can ' t remember the name of it--they do it. And
over in East Texas where they raise a lot of sugarcane, at
a lot of their little festivals they put it on like they do
here, just--
L: What ' s north of New Braunfels? Gruene?
B: I don ' t remember the name of the town. Gruene,
some--they grow some cane up there, some little community,
and I ' ve had several people comment on it and they do
it--just right about now they ' re getting ready for it.
L: There ' s a road between New Braunfels over to Canyon
reservoir--Canyon dam.
B: Yeah. Well, on IH 35 about ten t o twelve miles north
there, right off of 35 , some little town--
L: Now you ' re getting into San Marcos.
B: Well, somewhere in that area. I mean it ' s not all the
way to San Marcos, you know, I guess about half way in
there.
L: You ' re talking about my home stomping grounds and I
BRAMHALL 3
didn't know there was any sugarcane goin ' on down there.
B: Well, it's just--several people have told me about it so
I believe ' em . I haven ' t seen it but then I take--
L: But I get surprised from time to time because here
recently some fellow pointed out to me a, you know, l25-year
old log cabin stuck down in the woods somewhere. But--
B: It was there.
L: --you know, forty-some-odd years I had never even heard
of, you know, a faint whisper of a rumor of a building that
old in such close proximity. But, so in other words, this
is something that you just sort of learned for the Folklife
Festival.
B: Yeah, for the Festival, for the heck of it.
L: Do you do it during the year, then, any at all-­B:
No, there ' s--
L: --when you ' re not here at the Festival?
B: --no, there's not any cane around close to us and it ' s
jus t a hot job. If somebody asked me to , I would , but, you
know, there ' s--there's nobody ' s ever--not much demand for
syrup makers.
L : NO, there ' s not , but where do you get the cane?
B: This comes up from close to Santa Rosa right down in the
Valley. It' s next to McAllen , right out of McAllen.
There ' s one or two sugarcane plantations down there and
that's--Santa Rosa's the name of the little town. I think
that's also the name of the sugar outfit, too, sugarcane
plantation, and they send it up on a bus when you ask for
it.
BRAMHALL
L: Send it on the bus. (laughs)
B: Yeah.
4
L: (laughing) I don ' t know, just something strikes me as
being weird about that. (laughing) As opposed to hauling
it--
B: Well, if you were real serious about this you could haul
it up.
L: (laughing) If you were wanting to get authentic about
it. But , of course, you know--as I suspect you well
know--there was a time, you know, when every little
farmhouse, you know--or at least a heck of a lot of
them--had a little syrup mill and a grinder, you know, out
there in the yard, mounted , you know, usually on a tripod of
posts and, you know, hitched up the mule, the horse or
whatever--
B: The wife.
L: --and ran him in a circle--or the wife--and ran ' em in a
circle and you crushed that cane.
B: Well, that--really, the e nd of the home industry of
sugar syrup making came about the advent of World War II
when big industrialization hit the United States and the
people started--the women started working and the men were
off and they finally could buy syrup and the commercial
manufacturers found out there was a market for it and it
just died out right about then. There used to be almost in
every community was--usually was one or two men that had the
press and the vat to cook it in and the facilities to--to
draw it off in. And they didn't provide the buckets a lot
BRAMHALL 5
of times, they ' d usually do it on shares , keep every--a lot
of ' em kept one out of every three, a lot of 'em kept one
out of every five gallons that they made--
L: Urn-hum.
B: --as a charge.
L: The reason I ' m interested in all this is because my
granddaddy owned a cotton gin, a water-powered cotton gin,
and since it used water power it also had a saw mill and
they had a molasses mill.
B: Urn-hum.
L: And they had big vats out there, you know, in which they
cooked the stuff. And , of course, one of the real joys of
syrup making that my daddy and his brothers always
remembered, you know, were all the yellOW jackets and the
red wasps and the flies--
B: (chuckling) Flies.
L: --and everything else, you know, that would accumulate
around those vats, you know, as the stuff was being skimmed
off and--
B: Honeybees, too.
L: --honeybees, oh, lots of honeybees. Do you have that
joy out here with what you're doing?
B: (chuckles) Right here at the Institute we bypass that
step. We don't have the facilities to dispose of the skim
and the bagasse so we do it before. We bring the stuff up
here that's already been filtered out. We don't press it
here any more. Oh, we press a little bit sometimes for a
demonstration but we have the product cleaned up pretty
BRAMHALL 6
good when it comes here because it stinks sO bad and it
would be a heck of a hazard. (Lowman chuckles) There ' s a
lot of alcohol in that skim and you can drink it and you can
get drunk pretty quick. It ' s good hog feed. You can give
it to hogs and they get drunk and fall over dead drunk in
the pen and that ' s what really attracts all of those
animals. It stinks real bad because you put it out in this
hot sun and it ' ll ferment so, really, we don ' t have a way to
dispose of it handily so we just don ' t have it.
L: Why don ' t you just describe the process to me a little
bit? You know, the kind of cane that you use, the kind that
makes the best syrup and the time of year that you harvest
it, and then from there the general process of syrup
making.
B: Well, syrup making, a lot of people associate it with
the fall of the year which is true in a lot of places that
don ' t have to put up with all these bugs and wasps that we
do, but Texas and South Texas, the growing season is a lot
earlier and you just about now have to start harvesting it,
or rather, you have to start processing it because you
harvest it now and--
L: (unintelligible)
B: --and sugar cane--yes--sugar cane, you want to process
as soon as you cut it because the idea is to get it when
it ' s got a lot of water in it. You don ' t want it to dry
out. And after you harvest the cane, strip the leaves and
all off of it, you run it through a cane press which is just
a couple--two or three big, steel wheels with blunt teeth on
BRAMHALL 7
'em. They have about a zero clearance. It squeezes all the
juice out of the cane and you collect it down below the
press. When you get enough to start cooking, you put it in
a kettle and start cooking it and right off the beginning
you have a l ot of trash that ' s in it. There ' s a l ot of
leaves , a lot of bark, a lot of fiber from the cane plant
itself, and this rises to the top as you first start boiling
it and you extract that and that ' s called bagasse. Some
people call it ~asse. It ' s b-a-g-a-s-s-e. And it has a
couple of uses. That's what theymake the nail base--the
black nail sheet that they use in construction industry when
they ' re building houses--when they frame a house and you see
that black sheeting--
L: Yeah.
B: --well, that's made out of bagasse. And there ' s such a
large sugarcane industry in Hawaii that they use the bagasse
to fire the electric generators for the power for the public
utility companies over there. And so you take that bagasse
off and you can just throw it away, which a lot of people
do, or set it aside and l et it dry and put it back under
your syrup vat and use it for fuel to--it burns hot. After
you extract this bagasse, whi le it ' s cooking, the first
couple of hours that you ' re cooking this sap, a lot of s cum
or foam comes to the top. It's yellowish green and has a
pretty strong oder to it, and you just continually skim that
as it comes off and that ' s what ' s pretty high in alcohol
content and you can make hog feed out of it if you want or
throw it away and attract the bugs with it. A fellow was
BRAMHALL 8
telling me that in Alabama when he was a kid, they would
ferment corn for about three days till it started getting a
sprout on it, and put a couple or three inches of that in a
five-gallon container and then fill it with that skim and in
about three or four days you have a pretty potent moonshine
already started without even distilling it, just fermenting
it to real strong beer and switch what they later ferment
into moonshine. But that's another use for that skim but
mostly people just throw it away.
And then after you've t aken the bagasse and the skim
off of this you have the first step in the refining process
which i s molasses. And if you just wanted molasses you
could just stop right there and you ' d be through. But--and
you can extract some. And also, an allied industry is
manufacturing rum. Molasses is the base ingredient in rum
so I guess if they have a lot of sugarcane in Cuba, they
make a lot of rum in Cuba. So that, anyway, you can take
the mOlasses--usually your pots, your pans that you cook in,
here at the Institute we use one that ' s just a large, flat
pan that has one compartment, but you have deeper pans that
are divided into three or four compartments and you start
cooking the molasses in one compartment and you have a
stream of it running in there. And as it boils and gets
hot, the more refined product rises to the top and it spills
over the divider into the next compartment and, again, it's
further refined and the lighter stuff comes to the t op. By
lighter--I don ' t mean lighter in color but just a lighter
texture and sweeter . The end product of this distillation
BRAMHALL 9
process is sugar so the more you distill, the more you
process this molasses, the closer to sugar it becomes so the
liquid becomes sweeter and it also becomes a little less
thick, a little lighter texture. And then you
just--after--you call each stage, from molasses and the
next--each stage of refining is a strike. I don't know why
they use the term strike but they do. At about the fourth
str ike is what you call a commercial grade syrup and that's
what at the Institute here our little process demon--closely
resembles, is a fourth strike of a process. Then is when
you draw off your syrup and do whatever you want to do with
it. And, again, by processing, the end process is sugar
where you get brown sugar. Your first time you refine it
you get dark brown and then--and I don ' t know how to refine
sugar. I just know this from reading. You get a medium­brown
sugar and then a light-brown sugar. But to extract
the color from the syrup, which is caramel colored, you take
animal's bones and there ' s a genetic name for it and I don't
know what it is, it ' s milk of some thing or another, calcium
something, and you put this burned cattle bones in the syrup
and as it settles to the bottom of the tank, it takes all
the color out and you have clear syrup. And then you go
ahead and refine that clear syrup to white sugar. So if
you ' re drinking tea someday and it feels like you might have
bitten into a piece of bone or something, don ' t worry, you
might have but it won't hurt you. It ' s no worse than
biting--nibbling up alongside of the bone in at-bone
steak.
BRAMHALL 10
L: Urn. Well, I sure didn ' t know that. Now , this--this
compartmentalized pan that you that you were--the cooking
pan in the vat that you were talking about--
B: Urn-hum.
L: --is that only used where you're going all the way
through to the refined sugar end of it, or--
B: No.
L: --I didn't quite understand that.
B: No, you use it for the--for syrup. Now, most people--1
don ' t really know what the process--after you get a good
grade of syrup, then, you ' ve got to get a little more
Chemically oriented to get the sugar from it. I can burn
the syrup and make a nice , gooey mess in the pan . I don 't
know how to stop the process with the granulation instead of
just burning it, but there is a--there i s a step in it when
you do. But the compartmentalized pan, some people , instead
of a compartmentalized pan , they use a pan that has a
continuous trough in it that runs back and forth, just
crisscrosses the pan or side by side, not crisscross, it
just runs back and forth from side to s ide with corners, and
the syrup, you put it in one end and it runs through this
long trough slowly cooking it, and the more refined stuff is
at the front of it . And , again, you have the same problem,
by the time it gets to the end of the pan and you draw it
off, it ' s a pretty good grade of syrup. And it ' s up to you,
some people may like a coarser, stronger, less swee t syrup
and they ' ll stop right after molasses quality. That's up to
them. With this compartmentalized pan, a lot of people use,
BRAMHALL 11
we use a stainless steel pan here at the Institute because
it ' s easy to maintain. Before stainless, most people used
copper, and you could use black iron even, but most people
had the copper kettles.
L: Yeah. This is what my uncle was telling me just
recently that my grandfather used. So, at any rate, the
longer the stuff is cooked, the more refined the product
becomes--
B: Urn-hum.
L: --the better quality--
B: Or, it's sweeter and it's a little less dark. You know,
it dosn't become clear but it's less dark and it ' s a little
thinner, it pours easier, and it becomes sweeter.
L: But, you could use a copper pan that did not have
compartments and still achieve, you know, this high grade
simply by skimming. Is that what you're saying?
B: Right. Yeah. If you could skim lightly you could draw
it off if you knew when. Like out here, one of the signs
that the syrup is ready in its fourth strike and you would
know how to skim, too, is the bubbles become--as it's
boiling the bubbles come up and they pop right away, well,
they ' ll start stayin' on the surface of the water--the
surface of the syrup--and they will--they'll retain the
caramel color. At first they come up and they're clear and
they pop right away. Well, when they come up and they get
to about the circumference of a quarter, maybe a little bit
smaller than a quarter, and they retain the caramel color of
the liquid, then you can take the liquid on a stick or a
BRAMHALL 12
spoon or something and put a drop of it on a flat surface
just like when you're testing candy--
L: Urn-hum.
B: --and if it stays beaded up instead of running off or
flattening out, well then, that's a sign it ' s ready. If you
like the taste of it and it conforms to this criteria, then
it ' s ready to be drawn off into containers.
In the commercial process, I don ' t know why, how, or
how much, but they add--put sulfur in it. A small
amount--it has to be awfully small--and people have told me
over the years that their parents or grandparents used to
put a little bit of sulfur and I don't know if it's pure
sulfur or it's been diluted or if it's a mixture, but,
anyway, there's a little bit of sulfur added into it in the
commercial process and I believe that ' s to--for a
preservative to keep it alive. Because sometimes this
homemade stuff, if you don't seal it real tightly, it ' ll
mold on you pretty quickly so you have to make sure that
it ' s sealed up real well.
L: Urn-hum. Urn-hum. Is there any particular part of that
process you know that you deem particularly critical or is
it just at each of these stages, at each of the
beginning--well, (chuckles) is the--is the critical thing
recognizing, you know, the beginning of a particular strike,
so to speak, or what--
B: Yeah, if--
L: --what ' s a critical point in syrup making?
B: There ' s--the critical point is not to burn it, of
BRAl-1HALL 13
course, and to keep it flowing, but it's not a real
complicated work for--I wouldn't want to call it an art form
but it ' s a craft.
L: Yeah.
B: But it's not--it's not the most complicated and it ' s not
the most critical of the cooking arts there are. You do it
a time till you burn a pan once, you burn it up till you
get that gooey, caramelly mess that you've got to throw the
pan away and you look pretty quick that stage but it more or
less takes care of itself. The main thing really is to
clean it up at the beginning and get all the skim off of it.
If you don ' t, then it ' s a lot more bitter. But that stuff
is so obvious that it comes up and it ' s such a different
color and stinks so bad, it's no problem getting rid of it.
And it's just time comsuming and you get up and make
your--press your cane in the morning and get going through
the day. It's an all-day process to make a--for a family to
make enough. This open-pan cooking that we do here, you ' re
lucky to recover about thirty-five percent of what you start
out with so it's very inefficient as opposed to the
commercial operation which uses a closed kettle with
coils--recovery coils--and they cool, condense it again.
They condense the vapor to liquid and they again cook it so
they wind up with almost a hundred percent conversion. But
on this it takes lots of cane. Probably, you would have to
plant a pound of sugarcane, which is a lot of sugarcane, to
get about five gallons of syrup when you were through. If
everything worked--if you had a good year and if your cane
BRAMHALL 14
was good and juicy, and if you had a good hand with a still ,
you know, you didn't boi l it all the way , that would be a
pretty--pretty much a rule of thumb to shoot for, about five
gallons from a pound . And, like I said , a pound of
sugarcane will plant several long rows. It ' s not real heavy
seed.
L: Urn-hum. Urn-hum. How long have you been doing this now
here at the Folklife Festival?
B: I've been--this is, I guess, my fourth year , I believe.
Maybe my third year, fourth festival. I think it ' s the
fourth festival that I ' ve done the cooking.
L: What was your first year as a participant here?
B: I came aboard with Arnold Griffin and the Devine
Musicmakers, which I 'm still a part of. I pick guitar for
Arnold and Bruce Roark , the man that makes all those old
instruments, and I helped build and maintain the old log
cabin that they finally tore down and I was a hand on
building the old schoolhouse that's still there, where they
teach calligraphy . And then I did most of the sweating on
that kitchen that we were building, that old log ki tchen
that they finally tore down. I got to dig and put the rocks
down for that and then every year I added two or three more
logs to the wall and we put some shingles up. They finally
dismantled it and took it down, but I did that. And then
JoAnn came and asked me, when J. Young was going to give up
the syrup making , she said , would I be interested in that?
and like a fool , I said , "Yeah." So I took it , not knowing
it was the hottest (laughing) thing here to do.
BRN-mALL 15
L: Yeah, yeah. Unless it might be the horseshoe maker over
there.
B: Yeah, the horseshoe maker and I, we both get to stare at
that fire all day long.
L : Urn-hum. Urn-hum. What was your impression--your first
impression--of the Folklife Festival and how has that
impression changed over the years?
B: I had heard about the Folkl ife Festival. I didn ' t go to
the first couple. And then when I came to one, when I
walked through the gate, I fell in love with it. And I 'm a
history buff of Texas without going to a lot of--I' m not a
scholar but I like to learn about it and I like to talk to
old--I know years ago I talked to my wife's granddaddy .
He ' s ninety-nine, now, and I didn't meet him until he was in
his seventies, and the first couple years I knew him I just
kind of dismissed him as an old-timer and then finally had
the sense enough to sit down and talk to him and started
listening to him talk. He used to drive ox carts across the
Panhand l e in Texas and he was a twenty-five-dollar-a-month
cowboy and he was born when there were still Indians around
in the Panhandle. And he's seen electricity come and cars
and trains--
L: So have I. I've seen electricity come .
B: (chuckles) --so I kind of opened my eyes a little bit
and started learning a little bit. And when I came here to
the Institute, to the Folkl i fe Festival, I just walked
around and I did what I could at each booth. I tried a
little bit of every craft and talked to the people. I met a
BRAMHALL 16
lot of friends here and this is one of the high points of my
year. 1, you know, even as hot and miserable as that syrup
pit gets, 1 wouldn't give it up hardly. 1 enjoy it and 1
enjoy making the old-time music. A lot of these fellows,
it ' s sad when they pass away, these crafts and this music,
these songs , they ' re going to die with them and a lot of
these crafts are, too. Nobody's learnin' 'em. So, like 1
said, the Festival, my wife and 1, both, it's just a high
point of the year for us to come here.
L: Has your reaction or response to the Folklife Festival
changed any over the years as you've gotten, you know, more
familiar with it?
B: Well--
L: Are there any changes in production that you'd like to
see it take or is--
B: --1 would like to see--I know at one time they pushed
everybody to wear as authentic a costume as they could and I
know a lot of people now--of course, it's hot out there and
all, but they--everybody's wearing shorts and Kaepas and
their boots. I ' d like to see if it ' s possible to return to
the more ethnic oriented or if not ethnic, like in my case,
jeans and bib coveralls or some--and work books but I'd like
to see that. I don ' t know, I think the emphasis on the
early music and the culture is pretty good. I ' ve been
around, I've had a cause during the course of my regular
daytime job to be over here a lot. I used to be a fire
inspecto r downtown and I got to visit with JoAnn, and staff
a lot and I ' ve seen them turn down people that were strictly
BRAMHALL 17
wanting to be here because of the commercial gain they could
make. A lot of restaurants- - fancy restaurants --wanted to
come in here and cook and sell for the week just to make
money and I ' ve seen them turned down. And, of course, it is
a money-making venture, you can ' t deny that, but it's not--I
don ' t get the feeling it's solely here to make money even
though there is a lot of money changes hands. And perhaps a
little bit more on the--some of the people that do the
crafts don ' t get as involved with the people--the
spectators--as they should but that ' s kind of a
personality--
L: To do it.
B:--to that because a lot of people just can't interact with
strangers that come up and--but it would be nice if everyone
could.
L: It may be just a fluke but I've really been amazed, both
last year and again this year, how articulate these people
are, you know, that I've volunteered to interview. You
know, really in love with what they ' re doing and able to
talk about it and e xpress themselves very, very well and I
think that's a credit to those who make the choice, you
know, of who to bring here. They've been able to identify
the people who do know how to interact with the public.
B: Yeah, I think that's one thing JoAnn, when they offered
me this, was just because I couldn ' t talk to people--talk
too well to some o f them. But I enjoy it, and in that syrup
booth you can ' t really give handouts or anything, you just
have to stand there and demonstrate and tell people--
L: What can you demonstrate except you really--except, you
BRAMHALL 18
know, standing there and keeping that syrup from sticking,
what can you demonstrate?
B: Well, actually--
L: What can you do to entertain? I haven ' t stood there to
watch you , but what can you do to entertain them?
B: --it ' s the talking. You just have to put the talk
together and some days it just works better than others.
Some days I just get a flight of fancy and I can keep a line
of BS going and it ' s pretty cute. And, also, you can
judge--if you get a crowd of twenty or thirty people , a lot
of times they ' re much more lighthearted and you can crack a
joke or two and they respond real well. And sometimes
they're awfully businesslike . They want to know exactly
what's happening and they want to move on, and sometimes
they just look and aren ' t impressed at all and move on.
But the ones who stand around, there 's quite a bit of humor
you can interject to it. I tell ' em sometimes that I
learned this because they have a l ot of sugar industry over
by Sugar land where the prison is and I have a lot of family
that goes over there from two to ten years and they learned
how to make sugar, or syrup while they were over there. And
last year I told a lady just, I don ' t know why, but she carne
over there and asked me what I was doing and I told her I
was making ketchup and I went through a pretty good detailed
process , making it up as I went along, till my wife carne
over and threatened to break my arm if I didn ' t tell her the
truth. And yesterday I got here kind of late and the crowd
was coming in before I had my syrup pan on and I just had
BRAMHALL 19
wood burning, getting my fire ready. And I was amazed at
the crowd I drew of people that stood around in that
l02-degree August sun and watched the wood burn.
L: Watched it get hot. (laughs)
B: They just stood there and looked at it.
L: That's got to be somewhat similar to watching paint dry.
B: Yeah, a whole lot. I always had--
L: Waiting for the pecan crop, you know, to drop.
B: Well, if the people ask, I ' ve got some pecan wood, some
mesquite and oak, and so I kind of extoll the virtues of
each wood and explain to them how they burn at different
rates and they seem to be impressed and I was able to think
fast on my feet and I ~lOuldn't lie, you know. I tell the
truth-- (interview ends abruptly)