Sugar Shack

GRINNELL —Hayden and Rhett Selk and their cousin Hallie Puls never thought when they went to Jacob Krumm Nature Preserve Thursday to see how maple syrup is made that they’d have Eggo Waffles to go with it.

The 2- and 3-year-olds from Grinnell would never turn down breakfast.

“I’m sure you guys like sugar,” said Greg Oldsen, Jasper County Conservation naturalist.

“It’s a food group,” said their grandmother Donna Puls.

“I bet you’re getting bored. You want to eat something else? I have an Eggo,” Oldsen said. “Do you want hot or cold? Take a bite. Go ahead, bite in!”

Thursday was the first open house demonstration for the conservation department’s new Krumm Sugar Shack. Conservation naturalists have been making maple syrup in small batches at Krumm since 2015, but now the staff has a new way to demonstrate the process for the public.

It began as a conversation between County Conservation Director Kari Van Zante and Oldsen about the upcoming sap season and their desire to have a better boiling facility. The $7,000 “shack” was built with money from a Jasper Community Foundation Grant written by Oldsen.

“We decided to go post and beam style (on the building) as opposed to stick framing. It kind of adds to the whole ambiance of the place,” Oldsen said.

The evaporator setup came from funding through the nonprofit Jasper Conservation Connection, which provides financial support for parks and outdoor education in Jasper County. The Connection combined revenue from its fall festival, trail race and annual Halloween Hike to pay the $5,300 of the machinery.

Oldsen starts the syrup making process by pre-filtering the sap and pouring it into a feed bucket. The sap is gravity fed into a float box on the side of the evaporator. That moves the sap into the back pan on top of the evaporator, which drops 8 to 10 inches into the unit, allowing more water to boil off. As the syrup becomes denser, it pushes its way through the three dividers in the front pan where it’s finally drained.

Syrup makers use a metal beaker called a Murphy Cup and a hydrometer to check the density of the syrup. Pure maple syrup has to be 66.9 brix — a scale to test sugar percentage. As the syrup gets thicker, the hydrometer will float higher in the cup.

The evaporator is fueled by a hot wood-burning stove. The mixture must be brought to 211 degrees to make true maple syrup.

“When we go to shut it down, you have to have at least 15 gallons of sap on hand because, even after the fire goes out, that fire brick stays 900 degrees for so long you can actually scorch the syrup,” Oldsen said. “It takes a while to shut the whole thing down.

“It’s crazy to me how, as the syrup gets denser, it will push its way through the whole system to the front,” Oldsen added. “We do have it on a level and slanted downhill slightly to encourage it, but it pretty much does it on its own.”

Oldsen then looks at the thermometer on the evaporator. On the dial, zero degrees is the boiling point of water. The syrup will be ready when it’s 7 degrees hotter. He draws the syrup off thick and filters out minerals from the sap. The minerals are called sugar sand or niter. Oldsen said if it’s not filtered, the finished jar of syrup will have the niter at the bottom looking like sludge.

“The niter is sweet but it has an off taste, so you don’t really want it,” Oldsen said.

Maple syrup season could be ending soon. According to conservation naturalists and volunteers, sap harvest begins when daytime temperatures stay above freezing and ends when the trees begin to bud.

At Jacob Krumm, on an acreage around the shack, are 82 taps on primarily silver and hard maple trees. Oldsen tells guests black walnut, pecan and birch tree sap can also be used to make types of syrup. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup, and Oldsen said the taps this season have produced an average of 100 gallons of sap per day.

Before the new evaporator step up, conservation staff was using a simple turkey fryer and canning pot and would not have been able to keep up the sap production in 2019. In the first four years, the sap was purely for demonstration. It was used for taste tasting on top of Johnny Cakes at pioneer field trips to the Wagaman Mill in Lynnville.

Oldsen also took some of the finished product last year to Colfax-Mingo schools and tapped a few trees on the district’s property to demonstrate the sap draining process.

“Last year, we boiled down 80 gallons of sap, and it took me about two weeks to finish the syrup,” he said. “This considerably speeds up the process.”

With a bumper crop of sap and the means to process it, county conservation is looking at possible opportunities for their maple syrup.

To sell the sap, county conservation would need to research what federal FDA food safety regulations and guidelines they need to follow, as well as any stipulations on a government agency selling products.

“We’re going to see what hoops we have to jump through if we want to try to sell,” Oldsen said. “I think it would be a good fundraiser.”

Oldsen picked up the hobby from a professor as a student at Central College, but the naturalist never thought making maple syrup would one day be part of his job description.

“That’s the one thing I love about my job,” Oldsen said. “I get to do a variety of different things. We canoe, we kayak, we do archery, we do fishing, we do woodland wild lowers during the spring, we do owl calling and bat netting and bird damming. It’s always something new.”

Contact Mike Mendenhall 641-792-3121 ext. 6530 or mmendenhall@newtondailynews.com