Grand Rapids — The months between the end of the holidays and the start of spring can feel dreary, listless. People are navigating their own March madness. But for those who know how and where to tap into the hidden beauty of the state, it’s a sweet time. It’s the thick of maple syrup season.
March, give or take a few weeks for Michigan’s weather, is the prime time for that thick golden tree sap goodness we all know and love.
As spring grows near, maple trees begin to produce sugar in the form of sticky sap, bringing new buds and leaves to their empty branches.
As long as the temperatures drop back to freezing in the evening, the sap moves up and down through the tree similar to a vascular system, one that we can tap into with buckets and barrels.
While some may wish for the instant gratification of an early summer, without the natural cycle of lingering cool temperatures, we’d never be able to harvest maple syrup.
In Midland, the Chippewa Nature Center invites visitors to come and learn how to tap their own trees and turn their backyard sap into liquid gold.
In fact, most sugarhouses across the state are open during the weeks of March to share a taste of the production process from sap to syrup.
Having just tapped maple trees with my grandmother and her best friend on their property down the road in Coleman, I headed straight to the local sugarhouse to find out the next steps.
A sugarhouse is simply a wooden shack meant for boiling saps, with openings through the roof to allow the steam to escape.
At Blandford Nature Center, a beloved farm-turned-nonprofit, the sugarhouse was built in the 1970s, according to volunteer Chloé Prusiewicz. She and another volunteer were happily keeping a watchful eye over the day’s sap and feeding the fire beneath it.
Blandford uses fallen trees to fuel the fires in their sugarhouse, fully utilizing their surrounding natural bounties for the many local schools who send students by the bus to make their own syrup.
Walking up a dirt path to their wooden structure, the sweet smell of woodsmoke drew me right in.
Inside, the sugar house was toasty and warm, as the volunteers kept a close watch over the crackling wood and bubbling syrup, slowly caramelizing into that classic pancake topping we all know and love. Moms and their young ones popped in and out along with students on field trips.
Everyone got a sample of the finished product.
It takes about six hours from tree tap to bottle as you cook all of the water out of the sap and toast the sugars inside. Sap initially holds about 3% sugar content, but at the end of the production process it’s closer to 65%.
The hue will darken depending on how long the sugar has been cooking. What I sampled was not overly sweet. It had the perfect consistency with a caramelized flavor that lingers, showcasing the hours over the fire that slowly built an unsurpassable syrup.
Native Americans would repeat this process in a large cauldron over an open flame, one of which was set up behind the sugarhouse I was visiting. They would continue to cook the syrup until it was maple sugar, which was then packed into bricks later to be reconstituted with water.
“Syrup season marks the time changing, and it’s unique to Michigan to have this kind of opportunity,” Prusiewicz told me as she checked the crackling tinder. “The statistic is that we only tap 1% of our trees here.”
Who needs Canada with those numbers?
From pancake breakfasts to bourbon barrels, we live a sweeter life thanks to the symbiotic stewardship of Michigan’s maples.
Gary, the other volunteer, told me, as we gazed upon the buckets hooked up to the trees around the sugarhouse, that when harvesting sap, the tap is made according to trunk size to make sure there is adequate sugar left for the tree to revive for spring.
"That is being a good steward,” he said. “These trees, they don’t just die.”
For all you saps looking to beat your own March madness, might I suggest one of the many Maple Syrup festivals throughout the state over the next few weekends? I’m not sure what problem a pancake breakfast with some local maple syrup couldn’t fix.
Devinn Dakohta is a contributing writer for Michigan Enjoyer. Follow her on Instagram @Devinn.Dakohta and X @DevinnDakohta.
