EPWORTH, Iowa — When we think of maple syrup, we think of the East Coast and Canada where maple trees number in the millions, but up in Dubuque County, there's one farmer whose made maple syrup making a family business.
"We wanted to do something with our children in the woods," said Brian Wolf, a fifth-generation dairy farmer in Epworth, Iowa. "We started tapping trees and hanging milk jugs into the trees. We found out they weren't big enough. And then we started doing buckets."
What started as a hobby in 2000, is now a full-blown commercial operation. This year, Big Timber Maple has 5,000 taps on 100 acres of maple trees. The Wolfs produced 3,200 gallons of maple syrup last year.
"I never thought it would grow into this," Brian Wolf said. "Being the fifth generation on the family farm, I want it to go into the sixth generation and the seventh generation and I needed to find something sustainable that they were interested in. They were interested more in maple syrup than they were any of the livestock part of it."
One of his sons, Kyle, said the hardest part of the syrup-making process is tapping the trees and maintaining the sap lines. Sometimes animals will chew the lines and they'll leak, preventing the sap from getting vacuumed up the hill into the sugar house where it gets processed into syrup.
"When it comes into our sugar house, we filter it and the sap is then run through reverse osmosis where it concentrates the sugars into a concentrated sap and removes about 80% of the water," Kyle Wolf said. "Then we take that concentrated sap and we cook it down."
The syrup has to be made within 24 hours of the sap leaving the trees. That's because sap spoils faster than milk, Brian Wolf said.
Big Timber Maple: sticky and sweet
It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, so last year's roughly 3,000 gallons of syrup meant the trees produced more than 120,000 gallons of sap.
"I think just the volume of sap that a tree will produce in a year is always really surprising to people," Kyle Wolf said. "It doesn't seem like it could really produce that much."
The weather plays a role in how much sap is produced and even the time of year impacts the flavor of the syrup.
"Anytime it's above freezing at this time of year, you'll have sap flow in the maple trees, but when it freezes at night and thaws during the day, is when you get the most sap," Kyle Wolf said. "This year, because of the weather warming up sooner, we're probably two weeks ahead of when we generally would start making syrup."
Big Timber Maple started tapping the trees on Feb. 1 and has produced the most maple syrup it's ever made in February. The season typically only lasts about six weeks.
"When it first comes out of the tree, it almost tastes like butter," Brian Wolf said. "Then as the transition of the chemistry of the tree changes, it starts getting into a darker quality syrup. You get into the light maple, dark maple and then a real robust maple. Then what they call a buddy flavor at the end, which is where the tree starts to produce a green taste to it."
Iowa isn't known for its maple syrup. In the Midwest, it's more commonly made in Wisconsin and Michigan. The two states ranked fourth and fifth, respectively, for the most maple syrup production in the U.S. in 2022. Vermont is the nation's largest supplier of maple syrup.
"It's just not common because of the density of maple trees in our area," Kyle Wolf said. "If you have enough maple trees in your woods, it would justify doing it, but that's just not as common this far south in the Midwest."
In 2014, Big Timber Maple began selling its syrup in Hy-Vee and Fareway stores across Iowa.
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