Naturally sweet

SOUTH HAVEN — As spring emerges, Adam and Kia Czech string tubing through the woods about 10 miles from their home, connecting tree taps to a pump and its tank that is ready to collect maple sap. With the season underway, they continue to boil and bottle the natural sweetener with an eye on expansion.

“It’s a fun, healthy addiction,” Adam said. “A lot of people go deer hunting; I go maple syruping.”

This will be the third year the Czechs have boiled sap at their home in South Haven; previously, they boiled at a friend’s place in Sartell — the same friend who got them interested in making syrup. They started with 15 taps, but as of mid-February this year, they had about 500 trees tapped on 11 acres of leased land near Annandale. With so many taps, the Czechs use a vacuum pump to draw out the sap from the trees and through the tubing, but Adam plans to upgrade to a high-vacuum system that can support 1,000 taps.

“It helps pull it (the sap) out of the tree,” Adam said. “Typically, on 1,000 taps, we’ll make maybe six barrels of syrup; on high-vacuum, you’d make about 20, so you’d get that much more sap out of the tree, and it doesn’t hurt the trees. Everybody does it out East.”

From what Adam has seen, South Haven is right on the western edge of a maple tree belt in the state, and it is more difficult to find maple forests farther west. Minnesota is not as well known for its syrup production as Northeast states like Vermont, but according to Adam, Minnesota syrup often gives the competition a run for its money.

The tree tapping year is entirely dependent on the weather; the sap starts flowing once a spring-like period of warmth arrives. In 2023, Adam and Kia were already boiling sap, but in 2025, they were not even considering tapping the trees because of the cold.

“We typically don’t start doing anything until February or March,” Adam said. “There’s not a lot of prep work; we’ll do this for a month and a half, and then we’ll clean everything up, put it away and not touch it again until next year.”

Later in the season, the maple sap turns bitter when the trees start budding, so that is usually the sign to pack up the taps. First, though, the Czechs bottle some of the bitter sap to sell to manufacturers who can use it for flavoring or blend it so the bitterness is gone. The Czechs then remove the taps from the trees and put everything away.

There is a myriad of factors that can affect syrup flavor, especially the weather conditions.

“(A snowstorm) helps the flavor and helps the trees run better,” Adam said. “Typically, during the maple season, if you get a snowstorm, everyone calls it ‘sugar snow’ because it will end up increasing your flow for the next few days.”

The Czechs need to evaporate about 20 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, with the excess moisture venting out of the sugar shack’s roof. Adam burns 2-3 cords of wood per month to boil the sap; the first batch is entirely evaporated to sweeten the pan.

Adam gauges when the syrup is done by its temperature. He has an auto-draw system set to 219 degrees, approximately syrup’s boiling point, but the syrup will also be tested with a hydrometer to let Adam know if he needs to adjust the temperature up or down.

“Last year, there was a storm coming, and I started the day at 219 (degrees),” Adam said. “At the end of the day, I was at 217 because the barometric pressure dropped that much.”

When the syrup is taken off, it will contain particles of niter, also called sugar sand, a mineral sediment that clumps when the sap is warmed. To get rid of this, the syrup sits in a 13-gallon, heated, stainless steel container and has food-grade diatomaceous earth added to filter out the niter. The Czechs filter their syrup twice before they bottle it, and they also offer maple sugar as well as flavored syrups, infusing them with coffee, jalapeno and cinnamon.

Adam and Kia put their syrup on pancakes, waffles and French toast, but they generally recommend their syrup and sugar as a natural, healthy sweetener in general. They have used it for everything from making cookies to smoking meats.

“We’ll use maple sugar as a substitute for white sugar,” Kia said. “If you’re making banana bread, you’ll typically use brown sugar and white sugar, so we’ll use maple sugar instead of the white sugar. … The maple sugar doesn’t really give a flavor at all; when you taste the sugar itself, you can taste a hint of maple, but it doesn’t put a maple flavor into anything you’re cooking.”

Aside from bulk sales, the Czechs sell their syrup in person and at farmers markets, and they have a produce stand they set up along County Road 44 during the summer. They previously sold their syrups, as well as sauces and salsas, under the Get Sauced name, but they are phasing that out this year. They plan to keep selling syrup alongside their chicken eggs and goats, considering the name Goat Hill Maple.

Adam and Kia would like to have a bottling station and host an open house as they expand their operation, and they also encourage people to try making maple syrup on their own.

“It’s really rewarding,” Adam said. “You’ll either love it or you’ll hate it. I say that because it’s a lot of work, a lot of time invested in it for a very little amount of product, but if you enjoy it, like I do, it’s like a sickness; it just keeps going, and you don’t want to stop.”