Mild winter means early maple tapping in Oulu

Mar. 11—OULU — It's a quiet day at the sugar shack: Maple sap boils inside, sending up a shifting cloud of steam. A fire burns cheerily under the 80-gallon stainless steel pan, and a camp chair basks in the sun outside.

Sue Ann Dumke, 70, tends the fire while her husband, Dave, 77, collects sap from 400 buckets on their 76 acres that border Douglas and Bayfield counties in the town of Oulu. The Dumkes, who live in Brule, have made maple syrup here for 35 years.

"It's the best job ever," said Sue Ann, who usually reads a book as she tends the fire. "David's carrying all the heavy stuff and I'm like, 'Oh, I gotta get another log.'"

The Dumkes run

Brule River Farm.

Normally, they would have started their first boil about now; this year, they're on their second. Thanks to a mild winter, they started tapping maple trees and collecting sap at the end of January, more than a month earlier than previous years.

"This could be a really good year," Dave said.

"I pretty much know every tree. I know which ones are good, which ones aren't so good, which ones I have to get to or they'll run over."

They use pails to collect the sap, which is dumped into pails (if it's frozen) or jugs to take to the shack. The equipment has expanded over the years. "We used to be beekeepers, so we traded bee equipment for this pan," Sue Ann said of the pan the sap is boiled in.

Two 60-gallon stainless steel vats for storing sap came from White Winter Winery in Iron River.

"They were sitting on the side of the road for sale, so we went in and bought them all," Dave said.

A decapping pan for honey and plastic tank for chicken production were repurposed for maple syrup. The backup vat came from Rice Lake.

Keeping an eye on the boiling sap is crucial to avoid ruining a whole pan of syrup. It can also burn and stick to the pan, making cleaning a chore.

"At this stage, it's eyeballing it," Sue Ann said. "It gets a little darker; you can tell it's getting a little thicker.

"We take it off the pan and run it through a filter. Then I finish it on our commercial stove in our commercial kitchen on the farm, because then I can test it with a hydrometer."

They looked into buying a new filter press last week, but couldn't.

"Everybody's doing maple syrup because the weather's been so beautiful," Sue Ann said. "Our regular supplier is sold out at the size we want."

Records of past seasons — firing dates, gallons collected — are listed on the shack walls with black marker. The earliest sap boil before this year was March 5, in 2021. This year, they started boiling Feb. 5. Weather permitting, they'll continue for another month or two.

The latest they've finished cooking is early May. "We've known people who, if it's been a cold spring, have extended it," Sue Ann said. But a late finish could interfere with gardening or make contact with bears more likely.

For now, they are enjoying the snow-free trails and lack of muddy ruts. They've made the best job ever even better.