Sweet venture

The room is warm. The air is sweet. And maple syrup is on the boil.
“It’s a process of waiting,” says Bill Morris of rural Keystone in southeastern Wells County.
“It’s like watching paint dry — only slower.”
Morris, retired from careers in broadcasting and banking, is in his seventh year making maple syrup with the help of his wife Mary and their good friends Mark Prout and Sherry Small.
Together, the foursome make up the Sappy Bill team, tapping trees, collecting sap, boiling, filtering, and bottling their own syrup.
And most of that syrup is sold in a single day at the Jay County Historical Society’s annual Heritage Festival in September.
“That’s the primary place we sell it every fall,” says Morris.
The Jay County connection comes two more ways: Morris helps out on Sunday mornings at WPGW radio in Portland, and some of the maple trees being tapped are on property owned by Hartford City attorney Jim Forcum and his wife Julie, a former resident of Portland. It was Julie who suggested the Heritage Festival as a good venue for selling Sappy Bill’s syrup.
“It’s nothing but a hobby,” says Morris, who estimates the group’s compensation from sale of their product at approximately two cents an hour.
That’s because — as Morris always points out — maple syrup production is a slow, slow process.
The process starts when the weather is right, usually when the temperature is in the 20s at night and in the 40s during the day. That’s when it’s time to tap the maple trees and capture some of the sap that’s running.
This year, the group started tapping trees on Feb. 9. In four days, they gathered 400 gallons of sap from 51 taps on the Morrises’ land in Wells County and another 23 taps at the Forcums’ property.
The number of taps in a given tree is based on the size of the tree.
“Most of the time we put in one tap,” says Prout.
“You never put more than three taps in a tree,” says Morris, comparing the process to donating blood.
“It’s not supposed to be painful,” adds Prout.
Once collected, the sap, which is 98 percent water, goes into a wood fired evaporator and is boiled for 40 hours or more until it’s the consistency of syrup.
It’s then filtered and boiled some more over a propane-fueled fire ring that brings the syrup up to a temperature of 217 degrees Fahrenheit. Then — when it’s still at a temperature of about 200 degrees — the syrup is bottled by hand, one bottle at a time.
Morris passes the bottles to Prout, who fills them from a tap in the final boiler then passes them to Small, who uses a pneumatic wrench to secure the bottle cap then places the hot bottle upside down in a waiting box to activate the cap’s heat seal.
It’s a complicated process, and with sap being 98 percent water, most of what’s been collected from the trees goes up as steam.
It takes 226 gallons of sap to boil down to make 5 1/2 gallons of syrup, or about 60 bottles.
Last year, the team bottled about 30 gallons of syrup. “By far and away, that’s the biggest year we’ve had,” says Morris.
“We’re about half done this year,” says Prout, noting that they’ve bottled 15 gallons of syrup so far. They’ll keep on collecting until the weather changes to more springlike conditions.
Prout, who Morris calls the “brewmaster,” says that the color of the syrup changes depending upon when the sap was collected. “Earlier in the season, it’s a lighter color. It’s typically darker later in the season,” he says.
There are more than 100 enthusiasts making their own syrup in Indiana. There’s even an Indiana Maple Syrup Association for the producers.
For the Morrises, Small, and Prout, it’s a way of staying connected to the land and to simpler times. “Historically, it was about the only sweetener colonial people had,” notes Prout.
And it’s a hobby they fell into by chance.
Morris and Prout had been trimming some trees on the Morris property several years back when Prout’s son Douglas, then about 12 years old, snapped off an icicle that had formed on a trimmed branch.
He could taste the sweetness.
“That’s when we started counting maple trees,” says Morris.[[In-content Ad]]