Anchorage Daily News

Using a rubber mallet, Matt Weaver gently hammered the plastic tap into a half-inch hole in a birch tree at Kincaid Elementary School. Attached to the tap was a plastic tube that a third-grade assistant helped slip into the hole of a covered, five-gallon bucket.

Click to enlarge

Story tools

Comments

E-mail a friend

Print

Digg this

Seed Newsvine

Send link via AIM

Font size : A | A | A

And that was that.

Tapping sap from birch trees is so simple that, well, a third-grader can do it.

Transforming it into rich, flavorful syrup? Well, that's another story.

Right now is the incredibly small window of time in which birch-sap harvesting happens in Southcentral. The season runs from mid-April until about May 15, when sap from budding birch trees passes its prime.

This year, however, trees did not give up their sap until late April, according to Dulce Ben-East of Kahiltna Birchworks near Palmer, a representative of the Alaska Birch Syrup Makers Association. It's the second-latest season in her 18 years of commercial production.

"We started this year on April 29, and the latest we have ever started was May 2," Ben-East said last week, while taking a short break from processing. "The late snowstorms definitely delayed it a couple more days, and we had a cold spring, which didn't help."

Weaver, state Division of Forestry education coordinator, said that's part of the wonder of birch tapping. While there is limited science behind the process, some believe the bigger the tree, the more sap it will yield; others think trees with a larger canopy tend to have the sweetest sap.

In truth, each tree is a surprise.

"We have rules of thumb that seem to be true (for tapping), but every now and then we'll get a tree that just doesn't follow the rules," Weaver said. "We have the students measure the circumference of the trees, the canopy cover of the trees and its location and how close it is to other trees."

This information may help determine which types of trees are best for tapping, but the real goal, Weaver said, is to "get kids connected to nature."

For those tapping for fun, such as Bruce Fiske's third-grade class at Kincaid Elementary, the results are interesting.

But for Ben-East, who has a backlog of customers waiting for this year's production of organic, made-in-Alaska birch syrup, it can be stressful.

"Right now it is affecting my business because we are pretty much completely out of syrup, and we have at least 200 cases of syrup backlogged on order. Normally it's not that much, and this is only the second or third year that we have run out."

SAP SUCKERS AT WORK

It takes about 100 gallons of birch sap to create a gallon of syrup, Weaver said. That's because birch sap is no more than 1.5 percent sugar, mostly fructose. (Weaver once measured a tree with 3 percent sugar while tapping at Alaska Pacific University.)

Compare that with the 30 to 40 gallons of maple sap (which is mostly sucrose) needed to produce 1 gallon of maple syrup, and already the numbers are staggering.

Ben-East, whose husband, Michael East, has been collecting sap on the family's remote property on Quiet Lake since late April, said that translates into more work for a birch tapper -- or sap sucker, as they affectionately call themselves.

Michael East has been using four-wheelers and six-wheelers to access some of the still-snowbound trees, and the generator on the property is going nonstop.

The sap then must be flown to the family's processing center near Palmer, and the planes can carry only 23 buckets at a time.

At the center, sap must be filtered and boiled down into various finished products. Those range from the purest form of intense birch syrup, to cooking-grade syrup, to a breakfast-style syrup that is blended with organic cane sugar to create a milder version for pancake-lovers.

This season has been challenging, Ben-East said, because higher fuel prices mean he must pay the pilots of the plane about $475 per flight, up $50.

Meanwhile, the sap harvesting costs are fixed, regardless of how much is collected. Add in the shortened season, and sap suckers are worried about how much they'll collect.

"We can't tell you (about volume) yet," she said, "because the trees are still producing. So far we're getting lots and lots of sap but we may not get as long a harvest. The last time we had a late harvest, we had only 17 days of tapping. We generally like to have 21.

"A late harvest is not a good thing for the industry," she added.

Ben-East said Kahiltna Birchworks has tapped 3,300 trees this year, and each tree can produce about a gallon of sap a day. If the trees yield a little more, they could make up for the shortened season; a little less, and they may be looking at raising prices.

"We also became certified organic this year, and that's added to our cost," she said.

A SIMPLE PROCESS

Those who want to try tapping birch trees themselves better get busy. Ben-East said the trees will likely stop producing sap by mid-week, or as soon as buds start appearing.

At Kincaid Elementary in late April, the students walked into the woods by the playground to tap trees themselves.

"We've got the best white tree ever," said 9-year-old Almog Cohen as his group of four approached a birch tree at the edge of the playground.

Holding a clipboard for recording their data, his classmates, Joel Kim, 9, and Zephanie Tacas, 8, measured the tree's circumference and canopy cover while Talesha Franklin, 9, read the numbers to Almog.

Teacher Fiske said he likes the birch-tapping program because it fits in with the third-grade science curriculum.

"(The Division of Forestry) offered classes for teachers to learn how to tap, so I took it," Fiske said. "The kids like it, and it fits the theme of 'change' that we're studying."

Weaver approached the tree with a cordless drill that immediately drew the attention of the children. All wanted their turns at drilling into the sap wood.

First, though, they had to clean the outer bark of the tree to prepare it for the process.

As soon as the hole was drilled, Weaver helped the children pound the tap into the tree and attach its bucket.

The real fun would come the next day, when they would see how much sap the tree yielded.

Fiske said in past years, they have harvested as much as a half a bucket, which they then evaporate down to give the kids an idea of the process involved in creating syrup.

There is never enough for a full gallon -- not even a pint, he said -- but the children still get the idea of the process and even get to sample some.

"They get to smell the vapor -- it smells like cotton candy at the fair," Weaver said.

The best part, Weaver said, is that it opens the kids' eyes to the reality of food production, especially in the current market where prices are soaring.

"Some of these kids think it comes straight from Aunt Jemima, that she made it herself," Weaver said. "Then they see that it started here, with the trees."

Find Melissa DeVaughn at adn.com/contact/mdevaughn or call at 257-4482.

BIRCH TAPPING DETAIL: For more on birch tapping or to purchase taps, go to Kahiltna Birchworks' Web site at www.alaskabirchsyrup.com; or the Alaska Division of Forestry, forestry.alaska.gov, and type in "birch tapping" in the search field for a how-to

ADVERTISEMENT