Collecting sap the old-fashioned way – by tap and bucket

Rich Palzewic

Staff

March 4, 2024

STEVENS POINT – Taking its sustainability efforts to the maximum, Tapped Maple Syrup, located at 4501 Nicolet Ave. in Stevens Point, still collects sap the old-fashioned way – by tap and bucket.

“Whereas a high majority of maple sap collection in the world is done with the vacuum pump system, we don’t do that,” Jeremy Solin, who along with his wife, Abi, co-own the business, said. “We use the old-fashioned taps and buckets because we use our woods in other ways outside of the syrup season, and we don’t want the plastic tubing up all year. We’ve chosen to invest in labor over plastic.”

In operation for more than 100 years, Jeremy said the Solin family settled in the area in summer 1917.

“We’re connected to the land,” he said. “Maple syrup making is a family and community process. On any day, you can find three generations of us in the woods and the sugar shack. Our kids are the fifth generation of Solins on this land, and we hope to be able to care for it for generations to come.”

Jeremy said his great-grandpa was the first generation to tap trees.

Then, unfortunately, he said, his grandpa – who was a second-generation maple syrup producer – died shortly before he was born.

“Then my dad and uncle were heavily involved, and now it’s Abi, myself and the kids,” he said. ‘Some of my early memories are from trudging through the snow from the farmhouse to the sugar bush – which is about a quarter-mile from the house – and tapping a tree. We hung a lot of old coffee cans.”

Jeremy said the Solins want to be known as stewards of the forest.

“The health and well-being of the ecosystem is foremost in the decisions we make,” he said.

Jeremy said his dad, Dave, manages most of the maple syrup operation.

“But we all get involved in tapping, collecting sap, cooking and most importantly, sampling the syrup,” Jeremy said. “When I was in middle school, the family got into commercial production.”

From there, Jeremy said, Tapped continuously expanded.

“We had friends get involved and then started playing around with the infused-maple syrups,” he said. “My kids love helping and being in the woods. Who knows (what the future will hold), but there’s certainly an opportunity for them.”

This season

With Mother Nature being the ultimate decider in how plentiful or not the maple syrup season is, Jeremy said, “this year’s weather has been a mess.”

“It’s hard to say, but it’s been tough to predict – there’s still a chance it will be a decent season,” he said. “A lot of producers have tapped, but we have a fairly hard rule that we don’t tap until early March, and the season typically runs into April, maybe even through April.”

Jeremy said his dad didn’t historically tap the trees until the beginning of April.

“Over the last 30 years, that’s shifted by about a month,” he said. “The last couple of years have been a little bit earlier, so I’m sure we’ll continue trending in that direction. We’ve never even thought about tapping trees in February, so this is a new situation.”

Jeremy said Tapped utilizes several different strategies to make sure it has enough sap/syrup for production.

“We tap about 1,000-1,200 trees on a mix of our land and neighbors’ lands,” he said. “We also buy sap from about 2,000 taps. We also work with a few producers to buy their bulk syrup. It’s part of our business strategy – we won’t grow too much more on the number of trees we tap mainly because we want to support other landowners, too. We’re focused on providing an economic incentive to keep land in forests.”

With each producer having its own set of “rules” for tapping, Jeremy said the size of the maple tree – compared to the age – is how Tapped decides when to tap a tree.

“We’re aiming for at least a 10-inch tree,” he said. “The age is hard to tell because a maple tree can stay as a seedling for up to 50 years. That tree could be 50 years old when it gets to 10 inches or 100 – maple forests are fascinating.”

The syrups

Jeremy said Tapped is probably best known for its craft-infused and barrel-aged maple syrup.

“The main focus is to differentiate what we do and to broaden what we do with our maple syrup,” he said. “As we say, ‘we like to use maple syrup beyond pancakes.’ It’s a versatile sweetener, so when you combine the sweet flavor with other flavors in the infusion process, it expands the options. There are a lot of people who make maple syrup, so we realized quite early that if we were going to exist as a company, we had to distinguish our efforts on something different.”

Jeremy said they create a variety of craft-infused maple syrups for different uses.

“Maybe it’s best used in coffee or tea or used to cook or grill with,” he said. “It’s a mix of things (on how we come up with the flavors). We work with a lot of different partners – some of it is experimenting to see what works.”

Jeremy said the infused maple syrups include black umami garlic, blueberry, cardamom, cinnamon, espresso, ginger and red pepper.

Tapped also produces cocktail maple syrups in collaboration with Copper & Pines Cocktail Company.

“Our cocktail maple syrups make creating a cocktail easy,” he said. “We created the Old Fashioned Cocktail Maple Syrup featuring Bittercube Bolivar Bitters. In collaboration with Bittercube, we created the Cherry Bark Vanilla Bitters Cocktail Maple Syrup.”

Perhaps the most interesting segment of Tapped, Jeremy said, comes in the form of its whiskey barrel-aged maple syrup.

“That’s in partnership with Great Northern Distilling,” he said. “Barrel-aged syrups are richly flavored, taking on the deep flavors of oak and aged spirits. It’s an amazing syrup and takes on the flavor profile of the whiskey and the barrel itself – butterscotch, oak and vanilla flavors.”

Jeremy said Tapped uses Great Northern’s smaller barrels in the process.

“The smaller barrels allow us to maximize the contact with the surface area of the barrels,” he said. “The pure maple syrup stays in there for at least six months, and then we pull it out of there, filter it and bottle it.”

Jeremy said after the maple syrup is pulled from the barrels, the sustainability efforts don’t stop there.

“Those barrels have another life after us,” he said. “The maple flavor in that barrel (after we use them) is sometimes used for BBQ smoking wood. Every once in a while, we do a partnership with Great Northern where they take the barrel back and put a whiskey back in. The barrels keep on making the rounds.”

That being said, Jeremy said Tapped also produces the pure version of syrup.

For more information on Tapped Maple Syrup, visit tappedmaplesyrup.com.