An Unexpected Pleasure

Last Wednesday we were headed south for an overnight stay outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin. We saw that on the way we would be passing close to the Michigan State University Forestry Innovation Center in Escanaba. Last June we had stopped to see my major professor from college, Eric Randall. We found out that his son, Jesse, (now Dr. Jesse Randall) was the head of that center.

I emailed Jesse and he was happy to have us visit. That’s Jesse with Bud in front of their new building.

Inside, besides a classroom that will be totally wired for remote learning, is a very modern maple syrup evaporator along with a reverse osmosis machine that concentrates the sap before it’s boiled down further in the evaporator and some other equipment to make maple candy and cream. They are even experimenting with distilling syrup to produce an as yet unnamed “hootch” as Jesse calls it. The sap can produce an off flavor in the syrup if the tree warms too much in the tapping season. With climate change producers are getting a lot more of this off flavored syrup. Distilling it can remove the bad flavors. They are perfecting the process, but Jesse says the best runs produce a liquor that tastes like butterscotch candy, is smooth to drink and is 130 proof! So be looking for a new drink.

Jesse took us all around the acres of land. There were stands of poplar and willow being tested and developed for biomass production. There were Christmas trees for genetic studies and even a prairie maintained by controlled burning he is using to train students in the art of the controlled burn. But my favorite place was his sugar bush. This is a pure stand of maples, and to me there is no prettier tree. Maple sap is collected using plastic tubes now. You may be able to see some of the tubing running through these trees. I did my master’s research on this system way back in the mid 1980’s. Being in Jesse’s sugar bush was like coming home.