LOMAN — During a good year, Bill “Huntz” Wagner can bottle up to 15 gallons of syrup using the sap from maple trees surrounding his cabin outside of Loman.
Not this year.
“This is the least productive year I’ve seen in the 25 years I’ve been (making maple syrup),” Wagner said.
Wagner said he could probably get enough sap to make a few ounces of syrup, but has already pulled all of his tapping equipment for the year.
The roadblock is that ideal sap flow occurs when overnight temperatures drop below freezing and daytime temperatures reach up into the 40s or 50s, a situation that “gets the sap flowing,” Wagner said.
With mid-March’s record-breaking warm temperatures both during the day and at night, the dribble of sap into collection bags has been slim to none. And, the budding of the maple trees signals that the syrup season has come and gone earlier than ever, according to Wagner.
“Once those little buds start coming out, the season is over,” he said.
For the Wagners, tapping maple trees and making syrup is a family event and the camaraderie will be missed this year.
“We get so many people out here to do this,” Wagner said. “It is a bit disappointing this year it won’t work out.”
But, as a seasoned maple syrup maker, Wagner knows the hobby is one that isn’t always consistent.
“Some years, it gets flowing so much that we have to stop because we don’t have the time to keep up,” he said. “And others, well, others we don’t get anything. Like this year, this is just the worst one yet.”
Making syrup
Wagner began tapping maple trees in 1987 on the land he owns down County Road 82, just outside of Loman.
“The land has been in the family for years,” he said.
With so many maples in the area, Wagner decided he would educate himself on the art of tapping trees to make pure maple syrup.
“I never thought about maple syrup much, but after I started doing it, I started thinking about all the sap that has gone through the trees for hundreds of years and nobody made syrup,” he said.
Wagner noted that up in the Loman-area neck of the woods, there is no profit in making maple syrup.
“It is all done privately up in this area,” he said. “There is no commercial outfit this far north.”
Wagner explained the main reason the process isn’t a money-maker in the northern part of Minnesota is the type of tree growing in the area.
“We don’t have the best trees, which are hard maple,” he said. “Basically our trees here are soft maples. Hard maples produce more, sweeter sap. Those trees start growing south of here.”
Regardless of the type of trees that grow on Wagner’s land, he still embraces the sweet liquid and enjoys the process of making sap into syrup.
A year without sap flow
Wagner laughed that coming into this year’s syrup season, he felt he was more prepared than previous years.
“I had everything exactly all ready to go,” he chuckled. “I even had the trees I was going to use picked out. My wife thought it was humorous that I had everything ready to go and it was the worst year.”
In a season that varies from March 1 to May 1, Wagner said he did make an effort to collect some sap the first week in March this year. The crop of trees he selected to tap were located in what he calls the sugar bush. The sugar bush is an ATV ride away from Wagner’s cabin and is an area thick with the sought-after maple tree.
“I got some sap, but there is just no volume this year,” Wagner said. “It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallons of syrup. I wasn’t even close to that this year.”
Wagner hopes that next year, conditions will be favorable to collect sap so that he can get back into the art of making pure maple syrup.
“I guess I’m going to have to buy some this year,” he said with a laugh.
He acknowledged that the cabin’s table will be missing family pancake feeds that come with syrup collection and he’ll miss distributing the sweet liquid to family and friends.
Wagner concluded, “I always tell people, I’ll give them a jar of my syrup on one condition: They better return my jar.”
Huntz’s Westfork Maple Syrup Pie
Serves 6-8 people
What you will need:
1 cup fresh maple syrup
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup light cream
1 tablespoon sweet butter
1 tablespoon vanilla
3 egg yolks beaten
9 inch baked pie shell
Directions:
Pour maple syrup in small saucepan and bring to boil. Add milk and cream. Stir and cook over low heat. Do not boil. Add butter, vanilla and eggs. Mix and cook over low heat to thicken mixture. Pour mixture into cooked pie shell. Set aside.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Meringue:
3 egg whites
1/2 cup sugar
Directions:
Place egg whites and sugar in double boiler. Mix with electric beater at low heat until mixture forms peaks. Spread mixture over pie and cook in oven until meringue is brown.
