Hueston Woods to host annual Maple Syrup Festival

This weekend marks the start of Hueston Woods State Park’s 58th annual Maple Syrup Festivals. The festivities will be held March 1 and 2, plus March 8 and 9.

Attendees can get a pancake breakfast at Hueston Woods Lodge from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. each day of the festival. The Lodge bar will have maple syrup-infused cocktails, too.

Between 12 noon and 4 p.m., hay wagons depart from the Hueston Woods Beach parking lot to reach the starting point for a guided hike through Big Woods Preserve to observe the various steps in the production of maple syrup. The half-mile hike ends at Sugar House, where syrup, food, and beverages are sold.

Big Woods Preserve — more formally known as Hueston Woods State Nature Preserve — is an especially significant portion of Hueston Woods State Park, because it is one of Ohio’s largest examples of an original forest cover. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Matthew Hueston acquired several thousand acres now part of the State Park. He cleared the forest for farmland, but the 200 acres known as Big Woods were maintained as forest by his descendants until the last family member died in 1935. To protect the old-growth forest, a local banker and conservationist Morris Taylor bought Big Woods and sold it to the State of Ohio in 1941, so that it could be preserved as a park.

Maple syrup is produced by tapping a maple tree, enabling the sap to slowly drip into a collection container. The sap is transferred to an evaporator, where it is boiled for several hours to remove the water, resulting in a highly concentrated sugary liquid. The process of producing maple syrup is straightforward but time-consuming and labor-intensive.

Maple syrup is sold by class of color and taste, with a darker color signifying a more full-flavored taste. Golden color has a delicate taste, while amber has rich taste, dark color has robust taste and very dark syrup has the strongest taste.

As I write this, I am looking at three bottles of pure maple syrup: a golden and delicate, an amber and rich, and a dark and robust. The difference in color is striking. The dark and robust is noticeably darker than the other two.

The syrup was once sold by letter grade — for example, dark and robust was formerly Grade B. The old letter grades were discarded because they inaccurately conveyed a difference in quality, so were replaced by the current four classes of color and taste.

Pure maple syrup must be 100% pure maple syrup and nothing else. Leading brands of supermarket syrup are made from corn syrup and contain no maple syrup. Log Cabin pancake syrup, for example, lists its primary ingredients as corn syrup, water and sugar, with 2% or less of various natural flavors and additives.

Hueston Woods notwithstanding, Ohio is a minor producer of maple syrup. Our state is responsible for around 114,000 gallons, or 2% of the U.S. total. In comparison, Quebec produces around 16 million gallons and Vermont around 3 million gallons of maple syrup, more than half the U.S. total. Canada and the United States together produce nearly 100% of the world’s maple syrup.

It takes a lot of sap to produce a bottle of maple syrup. Estimates vary by individual tree, but roughly speaking 10 gallons of sap ultimately yield around a quart of syrup, according to the Ohio State University Extension Service. Thus, the 8-ounce bottles of maple syrup watching me type these words were processed from around 2.5 gallons of sap.

James Rubenstein is president of the Board of Directors for the Oxford Free Press and professor emeritus of geography at Miami University.