SJU celebrates over 80 years of maple syrup

Syruping on campus started with just a few monks, five-ounce buckets from the refectory and a few lone sugar maple trees by the monastic cemetery in 1942. From there, it has transformed into a near-professional operation celebrated by monastic members, the nearby community, students and parents through the yearly maple syrup festival, which commemorated the 81st anniversary this last Saturday. With temperatures in the mid30s, the festival drew hundreds of visitors to the sugar bush and featured maple syrup sundaes, a basic introduction to tree tapping, tours of the sugar shack, a bonfire and presentations and demonstrations from students in BIO 375 Natural History of Maple Syrup that included everything from syrup nutrition to a taffy making demonstration. The festival was the final event of the maple syrup week organized by OutdoorU, which was aimed to build awareness about the festival but also to provide opportunities for students to try the infamous St. John’s maple syrup—something that you otherwise must volunteer to help with syrup production or win to get a taste of. “[Maple syrup season] is such a community event and a community aspect of St. John’s… by being involved in OutdoorU, I get to see all the hype and anticipation around the season. When the sap starts flowing and we can start tapping to get the maple syrup, I think it’s just such a big event and to be engulfed in an environment like that is very special,” said Logan Woods, OutdoorU student naturalist. OutdoorU had events happening almost every day, starting with Flapjack Friday at the bus stops, with brinner, maple syrup sundaes at the Refectory, a sugar shack tour with QPLUS and maple syrup trivia following throughout the rest of the week. History With World War II at its peak in the early 1940s, the wartime sugar shortages made their way to the St. John’s monastic community. Cane sugar prices were skyrocketing across the country, and “monks like their sugar,” said Br. Walter Kieffer, head syrup maker for the monastic community. The operation started with a cooker in the candle shop, wood chopped entirely by hand and only 150 taps installed. For the first few years, it only produced a few gallons of syrup for a select few monastic members, but the operation continued to grow from there. The brothers primarily learned the process of traditional syruping from the Native Americans in the White Earth and Red Lake reservations. With more modern technology, they still implement many of these methods years later. The first “sugar shack” was located near the old ski hill, directly across from the Arboretum stone arch. It didn’t last long though, as it burnt down under suspicious circumstances, what Kieffer believes was college students breaking in to throw a party, in 1970. At the time, nobody thought to make a copy of records, and because of the fire, the records went up in flames with the shack, and they are left with incomplete records from the first years of tapping. The current shack was built in its current location—just past the prep school by the old athletic fields—in 1972. It has since been expanded to include a wood storage area and a garage to accommodate more modern needs. In the early years, tapping was only done every two to three years because it was such a work-intensive process. More recently, tapping occurs almost every single year, but as of last year, with different motivating factors than in the ‘40s, syrup production on a large scale will return to an every-other-year process. This spring is the first season without large-scale syrup production since the 2020 season got shut down early due to COVID. “To do maple syrup you need a lot of firewood, so one driver is that it just takes a long time to cure wood and produce that much wood every year. We were kind of always behind, and we’d use half-cured wood that doesn’t burn as well and doesn’t burn as hot, so we’re kind of wasting resources,” said John Geissler, director of OutdoorU. Additionally, because the evaporator in the sugar shack is so big, a lot of sap is needed to run it. Oftentimes, especially in slower years, it gets shut down too quickly because not enough sap is collected. The goal is that switching to every other year won’t impact the total amount of syrup produced; it aims to solely increase efficiency. The shift towards education In 2002, a major philosophical change occurred within the St. John’s maple syrup operation. Previously, the syrup was used by, and the tapping of trees was done, almost exclusively by members of the monastic community. Around the time, Kieffer, the chief syrup-maker, was working off-campus, so Abbot John Klassen approached the St. John’s Arboretum, now known as St. John’s Outdoor University, to share custody of syruping production. The beginning of the collaboration outlined three primary goals—to maintain the monastic tradition of making syrup at St. John’s, to provide the monastery with enough syrup to meet their needs and to provide educational opportunities for CSB+SJU students and the wider community. Presently, in addition to the educational events leading up to the annual maple syrup festival, OutdoorU organizes educational opportunities for all ages–preschool through college aged students. Historically, prior to the pandemic, between 800-1,000 local kids came on field trips every year, all organized through student naturalists. At each field trip, students are taken into the sugar bush, learn the science behind the syrup and get to practice tapping trees. “If you learn how something you’re putting on your pancakes is actually made, where it comes from and the history behind it, you appreciate it so much more. When the kids find out that there is sap inside of the trees that can become syrup they just light up. That curiosity and respect for trees really shows through,” said Carolyn Rowley, senior OutdoorU student naturalist. In addition to local students, student naturalists are also involved with CSB+SJU students. Every year, BIO 201 lab students take a week off from normal activities to go out to the sugar shack for a lesson on sugar maple physiology and the science behind syrup heating and production. Lessons like these are part of a wider goal of CSB+SJU to integrate experiential learning into everyday student life and to expand the classroom beyond four walls. Since it’s a process that relies heavily on community, bringing students out to the sugar shack is an opportunity to welcome students into that, whether it be by informing about volunteer opportunities or promoting relevant on-campus events. “It’s just such a tradition. Just at St. John’s alone they’ve been tapping since 1942 pretty much nonstop and beyond that Indigenous people have been doing it for thousands and thousands of years, so just to be a tiny little part of that and being able to [educate and] be a part of that continued tradition is just really special,” Rowley said. A labor of love During the spring freeze-thaw cycles, pressure changes inside of trees will cause sap to be moved from the roots up to the branches, allowing trees to be tapped by humans. Most trees, including boxelders, walnut and birch produce sap, but maples, particularly sugar maples, produce sap with the highest concentrations of sugar—about 2%. Lucky for St. John’s, they have an arboretum with a large sugar bush full of sugar maple trees. After the sap is tapped and collected, it must be heated so the water will evaporate. Legally, maple syrup is required to be between 66- 68% sugar, requiring high levels of prolonged heat and a lot of sap; for every singular gallon of syrup produced at St. John’s, an average of 39.9 gallons of sap must be collected. Whereas many modern operations today use reverse osmosis to filter water out of the sap or use tubing or vacuum pumps to bring the sap in from the woods, St. John’s still proudly does it by hand, with a crew of volunteers and monastic members venturing into the woods every production season to collect sap in buckets and load them onto trucks. They also heat the sap entirely with a wood fired evaporator. Until somewhat recently, all of the wood was chopped by hand too. “Going with the wood firing and the old methods, we do come up with a distinct taste. Maybe it’s the smoke that goes into it, maybe it’s the up and down cooking of it. If you’ve got gas or oil, you’re just firing at a steady temperature…I think that changes the taste of it. Even though it’s still got 66.6% sugar and the same or even better clarity, the taste is different,” Kieffer said. Although they have explored the idea of expanded electricity from campus to the sugar shack, the joint actors of the monastery and OutdoorU have ultimately decided against it. In addition to the financial cost of buying equipment and installing electricity, they feel as though modernizing the process would take away from the community being able to come together and work towards the final product. “I think this is one of these awesome examples of everyone being involved—the Abbey is involved, CSB+SJU are heavily involved; you have people learning at every level all the way from kindergarten to adults. You just need that community to make it work; one person cannot do it all. It’s a labor of love—you would never just go into it for only profit, and you just have to love the process in order to do it,” Geissler said. When the process is completed in the spring, most of the finished syrup goes directly to the monastery. Any community member or student who volunteers with the operation also gets a bottle in return for their service. OutdoorU gets some for their programming and some gets donated to the sisters at CSB, but maybe more uniquely, apart from a few isolated years, St. John’s maple syrup has never been sold to the public. At a grocery store, an average price of a gallon of syrup would be about $50, but at St. John’s, Kieffer cited that when he donates a gallon for the bi-annual Prep School fundraiser, it consistently goes for $500, with the highest-ever price being over $1,000. For the brief time that it was sold in the SJU bookstore when there was a particular unique surplus, Kieffer threatened to stop making it, saying that it was more valuable as a gift than it would ever make in profit. For use by CSB+SJU, the syrup is given primarily to Institutional Advancement for fundraising efforts. “We don’t show a profit on the books; instead, we give the stuff away. That results in great benefits to the corporation of St. John’s,” Kieffer said. Typically, it’s given as a gift to major donors, and it’s highly requested by all families, alumni and donors. “As a gift, the return is much higher than you could receive on the market…I gave this potential donor a loaf of bread and can of syrup and [there was] a check for $500…never sell a unique gift, it is priceless,” Reger said in the ‘60s. 62 years of syruping: Brother Kieffer Now a well-known figure around campus, in 1960, Kieffer was just an eager St. John’s prep school student with a passion for the outdoors. During his second year as a prep student, the weather was perfect for maple syrup production. With more than 1,000 taps running full of sap, they put out the call to anyone available to come help collect sap. “Being a farm kid of sorts, I volunteered to go out and got five other kids to go with me. One kid came back the next day, but I was the only one who stuck it out,” Kieffer said. By the end of that first season, he had gotten permission from the prep school to drive the tractors to haul sap until dark. As he says, it wasn’t good for his grades, but it kept him busy, and it was something he loved doing. When he first came into the monastery in 1966, all the wood for the evaporator was still split entirely by hand. The next few years were high productions years that required lots of wood–sometimes up to 40 cords (5,000+ cubic feet) of firewood. At that time, a wood splitter that had the capacity to do what St. John’s needed costed the equivalent of two and a half cars, something that the monastery just couldn’t afford at the time. “I had never seen a hydrolytic [wood] splitter at all, but I had heard of them. We designed one and built it and it’s still splitting our wood today,” he said. He got a budget from the monastery for $310; the wood splitter that Kieffer designed? $308. Kieffer learned to work with his hands from a variety of jobs on campus. His first year, he worked at the plumbing shop full time and helped with syruping operation by hauling sap and cooking with his extra time or throughout the night. Throughout his time at St. John’s, he’s also worked at the wastewater plant, as a firefighter and was the first ever EMT on campus. “Between plumbing, heating and EMT, I think I ran on four hours of sleep most nights, but now I’m getting up to where I’m getting about six now,” Kieffer said. During busy spring syruping seasons, he has been known to spend nearly every night in the sugar shack; at the most, he spent 16 continuous nights there. During those years in the 70’s, they would put out over 3,000 taps, meaning that every single one would have to be collected by hand. His everyday routine would be to take a shower, take a two-hour nap, change clothes and go directly back to the sugar shack. In those days, it wasn’t uncommon for syruping volunteers to sleep on the floor of the shack. When he wasn’t sleeping at the shack itself, he typically held a position as a faculty resident on various dorm halls, always aiming to convince his residents to volunteer for syruping production. One particular year in Benet Hall, he punished four residents by having them assist with chopping wood for a few hours. “Four years later, I came out there and it had to be 15 below zero…. I came around the corner and there were three of the same guys out there without shirts splitting up wood. They said, ‘we’re going to miss this next year, can we come back?’” Kieffer said. “I don’t think they ever did, but they loved it. They said it was a full body workout.” In recent years, Kieffer has taken over much more of a supervisory role, aiming to teach the craft to others and ensure that the tradition is carried on. Although he maintains a passion for the craft, he says he’s ready to soon pass his role onto other monastic members and OutdoorU employees. “After 62 years of working with it, I’m not ready to step aside yet, but I certainly want to slow down,” Kieffer said.