Hurley students make maple syrup

By CHARITY SMITH

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Hurley — The Hurley community was able to come out to the Hurley K-12 School sugarhouse on Saturday to watch as students in the district’s Tappin’ and Sappin’ program produced and bottled fresh maple syrup.

During the demonstration students, with the assistance of Darrin Kimbler of Extension Iron County, wood shop instructor Roger Peterson, and science teacher Dan Rye, explained to the community the process of maple syrup making from collecting the sap at offsite locations to filtering it to bottling it.

They said the need for the process is because the sap collected in the woods is only 2% sugar and has to go through a multi-stage filtration and boiling process to become maple syrup which is 66% sugar.

“It’s kind of neat,” said community member Roger Gallo. “I like watching it. I like seeing whatever happens and how they do it. ... This is very good tasting.”

The program was started by Peterson and Rye. Peterson said that Rye had wanted to do it six years ago, but Peterson wanted to wait a few years to start the program, so he could gain more experience producing syrup himself. Peterson said he was initially granted $1,000 seed money from the school foundation in 2019 and then was later awarded a $25,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Acer Access which is facilitated through Michigan State University in 2020.

“We were all in the wood shop class and then (Peterson) was like hey I think I’m going to do maple syrup, because that has to do with wood shop and trees and he was like I really want to get you guys outside to go and see nature,” recalled Olivia Louma, 15.

Peterson said this is the first year the students have been able to do the entire process at their own sugarhouse. The students built the sugarhouse in wood shop last year. This is the first year they had enough taps in the trees to collect and harvest the sap. He said initially the students were going to collect the sap in 2021 and had taps in all the trees, but were unable to do so because of the pandemic.

He said that year he harvested the sap himself and provided the students with a bottle of syrup so they could at least have a taste of the fruit of their labor. However, he said it is thanks to the pandemic that the school was able to get the grant through MSU. He said that the school was wait-listed as the grant had been filled, but because of the pandemic someone backed out and they were able to get it.

Peterson said there’s lots of math and science involved in the program, including calculating the volume of sap in a tank. “With the ratio of 40 to 1, 40 gallons of sap equals 1 gallon of syrup. So they have to be able to say I have 300 gallons of sap how many gallons of syrup is that going to get me? From a physics aspect, the density of the sugar content is important.”

The school sells the syrup.

“It’s a good little side job,” said Neil Schwab, 16, said of the program. “We sell lots of different things, but this we do the whole process ourselves, we don’t get work done from somewhere else. We don’t have anything shipped in.”

The proceeds from the syrup sales help to run the wood shop program, and to purchase additional equipment and supplies for the wood shop and the Tappin’ and Sappin’ program.

“That’s the thing we like to have over the store bought syrup that uses corn-syrup and stuff like that is that we have a nice roasted flavor instead of that heavy sugar,” said Schwab.

The program will be in full swing through next week depending on how soon the trees bud. He said the syrup is processed twice weekly during the season at the school.

The trees were tapped on property owned by Peterson and Rye in Iron County.