Sweet family fun

MAPLE LAKE, Minn. — Dan Elsenpeter and his wife, Erica, have been making maple syrup together ever since they started dating. Now, more than 20 years later, their maple syrup operation and their family have grown.

Dan recalls his dad cooking maple syrup over an open fire in the woods when he was a child. Dan re-experienced maple syrup making in 2003 when Erica’s family was experimenting with cooking sap. Dan went home and found the original 25 taps his dad used and started tapping maple trees around his home farm that same spring.

“Nobody in Erica’s family cooks anymore but I kept going,” Dan said. “I kind of took it and ran with it. It works well for me because I am here all the time.”

At first, Dan brought his sap to Erica’s family, but soon he had a cooker built so he could cook down his own sap.

“I had a kid who used to work for us who was taking a welding class at school,” Dan said. “He built a 2- by 4-foot stainless steel pan for me. I built the fire pit out of a used fuel barrel for it to sit on.”

Since then, Dan and his family have been putting out more and more taps each year, slowly expanding their operation.

“When the kids were little, we tapped about 100 trees and Erica and I did everything ourselves, usually with a car seat strapped in the side-by-side,” Dan said. “That was a lot of work. Now, the kids have really gotten into it.”

Today, Dan and Erica, along with their eight kids — Henry, George, Harvey, Ralph, Dorothy, Leroy, Pearl and Norman — set more than 300 taps every spring.

Dan and his brother, Luke, milk 200 organic cows in a swing-16 parlor at their sesquicentennial farm near Maple Lake. The kids help on the farm and with the maple syrup.

Everyone plays a role in the syruping operation. The kids collect the sap, pour it into a tank in the back of their side-by-side and bring it back to the farm. Dan oversees the cooking before he and Erica bottle the syrup.

Many of the Elsenpeters’ neighbors let the kids tap trees on their property in exchange for some of the final product.

As their maple syrup production increased, the Elsenpeters became more efficient through upgrading their cooker. The first homemade cooker they used worked for about five years. Then, Dan found one in the fine print of an auction listing. That worked well for the next 15 years until last year, when they again upgraded.

“The old one couldn’t keep up,” Dan said. “We had so much sap coming in.”

With the old evaporator, the Elsenpeters were cooking down 35 gallons of sap per hour. With the new cooker, they have increased to about 60 gallons.

On average, the Elsenpeters get between 60-80 gallons of finished maple syrup each year. On good years, the family can get around 100 gallons of syrup. The sap to syrup ratio is 40:1, meaning it takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup.

With the new cooker and the season off to a good start, they hope to reach 100 gallons of syrup this year, Dan said.

“The season might be two weeks, or it might be a month and a half,” Dan said. “You just never know what Mother Nature will bring.”

One reason the maple syrup works well for the Elsenpeters is the time of year it is harvested.

“Everyone has cabin fever and wants to get out,” Erica said. “We can’t get in the fields yet or do much else. Everything is mud or frozen.”

In years when the Elsenpeters get a lot of maple syrup, they take it along with cuts of meat to the Makers and Growers Market in Maple Lake that began in 2023.

“We aren’t in the business to sell it; it’s mostly just for fun,” Dan said. “We hand some syrup out to all the family and neighbors that let us tap their trees. It’s more about everybody getting out and having a good time.”

One night every spring, the Elsenpeters invite their neighbors over for a party while the cooker is going. They grill burgers and everyone brings a dish to share.

“We have one neighbor who grills breakfast sandwiches; they’re just amazing,” Dan said. “We dip the sandwiches in maple syrup and people talk about that party for the rest of the year. We pick a night when we will have the cooker going so it’s nice and warm in the shed and you can smell the syrup in the air.”

Dan said he has gotten a lot of questions about maple syrup over the years.

“People ask, ‘What do you put in it to make it taste so good?’” Dan said. “The answer is nothing. It’s just sap from the trees cooked down. Not many people do it, and the end product is something that everybody likes.”

The Elsenpeters said they have a lot of memories from making maple syrup and they look forward to creating many more.

“We’ve sat out in the sugar shack in a snowstorm cooking and all the kids are bundled up playing cards,” Dan said. “I like cooking it and the end product, but (also) people this time of year are looking for an excuse to get together.”

Erica agreed.

“I like that it’s something different to do in the evenings as a family,” she said.