The trees are tapped out at Peoria Park District’s Camp Wokanda and syrup season is in full swing.
Land Steward Jacob Mol says the program that he started with a modest ten sugar maple trees in 2015 now extracts thousands of gallons of sap from more than 200 trees a year. Mol got his start in syrup production as a child in Michigan.
“My dad would tap the trees in the backyard and it was just kind of a small 20 tree operation and mostly just to give away to family and friends and eat on pancakes,” he said. “And so that’s kind of how my knowledge base came, which was pretty well how we got started here.”
The classic image of a bucket below a dripping tree isn’t quite how Mol runs things.
The sap collecting operation is located in two areas of the camp. Trees are connected by a continuous spider web of sap collection tubes. Mol says the tubes stretch back into the trees for miles, snaking down a hill and ending in the “sap shed,” a small structure containing two vacuum pumps to help the flow along and a 1,100 gallon sap tank.
As Mol explained how the vacuum pumps increase sap yield by as much as five percent, clear sap flowed easily into the tank. It has basically the same viscosity as regular water.
“It’s almost all water,” he said. “So it surprises people and they’re like ‘oh, it looks like water.’ That’s because it’s mostly water.”
Mol said sap is only around two percent sugar in its unrefined form. For comparison, the finished product is about 67% sugar. But there’s still several steps before the sap reaches the sticky, sweet consistency of maple syrup.
Syrup operations like the one at Camp Wokanda are rare in the Midwest.
“There’s not a ton of woods like you would have in the Northeast, Maine, Vermont or even upper Midwest, Michigan, Wisconsin,” said Mol. “But, with the park district, land being very abundant with wooded areas and just, it’s something to do with the Illinois River Valley that always stays a bit cooler than everywhere else.”
Favorable temperatures are key. Prime sap collecting season requires mild temperatures during the day that drop below freezing at night. The warm daytime temperatures allow for the sap to flow, while the freezing at night builds up pressure in the trees to push the sap along the collection tubes.
Mol said the season typically lasts somewhere between four and six weeks.
“The other determining factor is the sugar content in the tree sap does vary from year to year based on the previous season’s growth,” he said. “So if the weather was good, if it had enough rain and good growing temperatures, a tree will have a higher sugar content the year after that.”
Mol said the change in sap’s sugar content can have a dramatic effect on the syrup produced, with a disappointing growing season restricting the final amount by tens of gallons. Mol estimated the average at around 4,000 to 5,000 gallons of sap collected and 90 to 100 gallons of syrup made a year.
Once the season draws to a close, an outflow line is attached to the sap collection tanks and brings the raw product to a storage tank behind the kitchen. From here, the sap is processed through two different machines.
First, the workhorse of the kitchen, the reverse osmosis machine, which removes around 100 gallons of water from sap an hour. The machine is a maze of compartments, tubing and gauges.
“Instead of two percent base, which we have coming out of the tree, this will take the water out, and it may come out of here six to eight percent sugar at that point,” said Mol. “The water comes out by means of pressure through a membrane, which is like a filter with very small holes in it.”
Next, the sap goes through a wood-fired evaporator: a two-foot wide, six-foot long metal frame that burns all day and evaporates water out of sap at around 40 gallons an hour.
“It’s pretty efficient, but not nearly as efficient as our reverse osmosis machine,” said Mol. “But paired together, you can process a lot of sap down to syrup pretty quickly.”
After as much water is evaporated out, and as much sugar remains as possible, the substance that is now syrup undergoes one more level of filtering. Mol explained this filtering, which is done through two buckets separated by a filter with a vacuum pump at the bottom, removes a byproduct of the cooking process called “sugar sand.”
“After that, it will go into a hot hold bottler and this bottler can hold up to seven gallons of syrup,” he said. “And we’ll kind of add to it throughout the entire day, as we get syrup off.”
After bottling in a variety of sizes, Mol sends the syrup over to Forest Park Nature Center. The syrup typically hits the shelves in late March.
All told, Mol said the cooking process takes a team of four people between 10 and 12 days.
When Mol started at Camp Wokanda, he was mostly focused on managing camp rentals. He said the staff were looking for something to do in the off season, which he realized overlapped perfectly with maple syrup season.
“I wondered if people would enjoy that,” he said. “And it ended up they really did and it started just like that and grew to what it is today.”
The public has an opportunity to get the first taste of this year’s harvest at the Camp Wokanda Maple Harvest Festival on Saturday, March 22.
