As Door County gets its first couple shots of “spring” like weather you may see buckets affixed to many trees throughout the peninsula. This time of year is prime time for maple syrup production.
Collecting this sweet treat is pretty labor intensive and does take some practice. The process starts by drilling small holes into sugar maples and then placing a metal tap or spigot into the pre-drilled hole. The cold nights and warm days are what make the sugary liquid flow. What flows into the buckets is not the final product however. They call this stuff sap. Sap only has 2%-4% sugar by volume. Once the sap is collected it is boiled down to condense the mixture to the optimal sugar concentration. This final product is what you put on your pancakes in the morning. It typically takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup.
One may wonder how Wisconsin stacks up against other maple syrup producers. Well Wisconsin is one of the top five maple syrup producers in the country along with Vermont and New York. On average the Badger State produces 117,000 gallons of syrup each year.
So as you drive through the county and see the metal buckets dangling throughout the wooded areas of the peninsula remember that maple syrup is one of Mother Nature's sweet treats!