- Will you consider this?

There's nothing like pancakes and waffles to start out the day, but you really need that sweet, caramel-colored liquid to top 'em off.

Yep, syrup.

Of course, Vermont is known for its maple syrup, but Camp Wokanda's homegrown, not so much.

We'll explain.

(upbeat music) For many years, we knew Camp Wokanda as a place for Area Boy Scouts to hone their wilderness skills.

It's part of the Peoria Park District now, and it still offers the outdoors, but to everyone.

All those lovely trees we notice, especially in the fall, their brilliant colors and everything, they have a little secret.

Jacob Mol is in charge of the Camp Wokanda Maple Syrup yield.

Welcome.

- Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.

- So let's first talk about, so Camp Wokanda came into proprietorship of the Park District in the mid '90s?

- Yeah, it was the mid '90s.

Before then, it had been Scout owned and operated, and they decided to sell it as a part of kinda downsizing some of their smaller camps.

- Mm-hmm, and you got involved with Camp Wokanda after college, or kind of during college, did you do an internship?

- Yeah, so the last of my college requirement was an internship in the field, and so I'd done part of that with the Peoria Park District in 2009.

I worked at Forest Park Nature Center.

And then after I graduated, they had room for me to stay on, 'cause I really enjoyed the work down there.

Did that for about six months, and then that's when the Camp Wokanda manager position opened up, and I've been there ever since, 2010 onward.

- Okay, so you're the guy.

- I am.

- (laughing) All right.

Well, let's get to the trees.

And you need maple trees to make maple syrup, but I guess you can make maple syrup out of other things, other trees too, right, or?

- Yeah, predominantly maple trees.

You can use a lot of different types of maple trees.

Now, the sugar maple is what we have out at camp.

And it gets its name because it has the best sugar content in the sap.

- Okay.

- But you can use red maples, silver maples, Norway maples, any of those will work fine for making maple syrup.

- Mm-hmm, and, okay, so you tap the trees, and there's certain time of year, is there a window of time when you have to tap those trees?

- Yeah, so it's usually late winter, early spring.

We're looking for specific weather conditions where it's above freezing during the day so that the sap will thaw and run, but then below freezing at night because that freeze will build up the pressure inside the trees to have good sap flow after it thaws.

- (laughing) So you're finding out a lot more.

You said that your dad, growing up, you had some maple trees at home, and your dad would make very small-batch quantities of maple syrup.

- Yeah, we were up in Michigan when he was doing that, and I was in high school.

And he would just do it in his backyard, he had about 10 trees he would tap and a small little cooker outside on the fire pit, and he would just make a little bit of syrup.

And that's kinda where I was first introduced to it.

And that's kinda how we started out, out at camp, when we started it.

It was more of just a little program to kinda show people, "Here's how you can take a couple of trees in your backyard and make some maple syrup out of it," and walked 'em through the whole process.

- Hmm, so you started the maple syrup program then, or it was already up and running, and then you kinda jumped in, or what?

- Yeah, no, I started it from its infancy.

We were really just looking for what we could do in a time of year when the rentals were kinda slow and we had more time to do things.

So we started it with the program, just with those 10 trees, just to kinda show people.

And after about three years of that, we got enough people asking, "Well, are you ever gonna sell this stuff?"

And we kinda went from that point on to see what it would take to do a production-level operation, which is a lot different from just a program operation, because you need to have certain benchmarks of a kitchen that is licensed for food production and inspections and.

- But you needed that for rentals anyway, right?

- Yeah, well, it was fortunate that the dining hall, which was the old Scout mess hall, it was designed to feed 300 Boy Scouts.

And it already had a substantial-sized kitchen behind it, so we just did some slight augmentation of that and added a couple things, and it was really a pretty easy transition then at that point.

- Okay, well, how many maple trees are there at Camp Wokanda location and do you tap 'em all?

- Oh, there's thousands out there.

Now, we don't tap 'em all, we kinda have an area of population that is good access for both collection and access for pumping it up to the kitchen, because you really have to look at kind of the efficiencies of what you wanna do in a maple syrup operation to make sure that it all works out to the point where you can make a lot of syrup, but not take a lot of time doing it.

- It's worth your while.

Do maple trees need to be tapped?

I mean, is it important for them to be tapped every year?

- No, no, you don't have to tap the maple trees, they'll be just fine without it, but for tapping, we just take a very small percentage of the sap that they use, and we use that to make syrup.

So it's only about, in Illinois, it's only about three to four weeks is a typical season.

- Mm-hmm, oh, all right, so walk me through the tapping process then.

You go around, and you're not knocking on the trees to find out if they're ripe, you have certain trees that you know that you can rely on?

- Yeah, we have certain parameters.

We usually like to take trees that are 10 inches or larger in diameter.

- In diameter, sure.

- Yeah.

(drill whirring) And then we'll tap those trees every year, and we'll just move the taphole from the previous year to fresh wood.

And so we'll take out, go in the woods with a drill, and we drill a hole about an inch and a half deep into the tree.

(hammer tapping) And then we collect using tubing.

Now, traditionally, you could collect using a metal tap and a bucket hung on it, which still works fine if you wanna do it that way, but with us, we're doing over 200 trees at this point.

And to collect 200 buckets in a day, it'd take forever.

So we do.

- Right, again, efficiency.

- Yeah, exactly, exactly, so.

And the efficient side of me would decide that we'll use tubing, and go from every tap to the next tree, to the next tree, kind of just weaves down the hill into our giant collection tank.

- [Christine] So they're all connected?

- [Jacob] They're all connected, yeah, yeah.

- Okay.

- We have probably 15 runs of tubing that go to different sections of the woods, and they all end up at our big collection tank at the bottom of the hill.

- Hmm, who does the tapping?

Are you the only one or you have a crew that goes out and taps and puts the tubing in and?

- Yeah, it's mainly myself, and then I have a couple part-time employees that help, as well as several volunteers that will come out and help with that process.

- Okay, well, how much sap comes out of a tree?

And how long does it take in a day to collect what you need?

- Yeah, so typically, a tree will produce a gallon or so of sap in a day, with the correct conditions, weather conditions.

And that, so for 200 trees, you could say anywhere from 200 to 400 gallons, kinda depending on how good the weather conditions are.

And our tubing is also under vacuum, which creates increased sap yields.

So this year, our best day on 200 trees was 800 gallons.

- Whoa.

- Yeah.

- So how much sap do you need to make a quart of syrup?

- Yeah, yeah, so the typical ratio is, for one gallon of finished syrup, you need around 40 gallons of sap.

(water flowing) - Okay, and then how much do you produce a year?

How much do you boil down?

And you have it for sale too.

- [Jacob] Yeah, yeah, over the past three years, we've averaged close to 100 gallons of finished syrup in a year.

So yeah, it's a lot of water to remove from sap, because your sap typically only starts at 2% sugar, and finished syrup is around 66%, 67% sugar.

So you have to remove a tremendous amount of water from the sap, through either cooking or other means.

- And the color changes, 'cause sap is kind of clear, isn't it?

- Yeah, it's clear and it tastes pretty much like water, maybe just a hint of sweetness if you're just taking a taste from the tree, yeah.

- All right, so you have all of those 200 trees all hooked up and you're collecting, where are you collecting it, in a tub or?

- Yeah, we have a 1,000-gallon tank that we have at camp.

And we'll collect usually for two days, and then boil after that.

And so the tank is at the bottom of the hill, and then it pumps it a couple hundred feet to the kitchen behind the dining hall.

And from there, we will take it through reverse osmosis.

And so that's how we're getting a lot of efficiency in removing water without having to do any cooking.

So reverse osmosis, in a residential sense, is usually something that will take pure water out of a liquid.

And typically, you would keep that pure water and drink it, but in our sense, we want to keep everything else, which is the sugar that's left behind from the sap.

So we can take about 75% of the water out with our reverse osmosis machine at camp.

So for example, if we had 400 gallons to start with of sap, if we just cooked on our evaporator, it would take us about 10 hours to cook that down to syrup, but with reverse osmosis, you would take about 300 gallons of water out before you even got to the cooker.

And then you're looking at like two to three hours of cooking after that point.

So it's a tremendous time savings.

- It really is.

Is there somebody then, so what's the cooker, once you get it to that point?

Because it used to be in like a cabin or something with a great big aluminum table, and they'd have to be stirring it, and there's steam everywhere.

Do you do the same thing with your cooker?

- Yeah, it's probably similar to how you remember it a long time ago, where it is a two-foot-wide-by-six-foot-long evaporator with pans on top of that, same dimensions, and the sap would go into there.

And it's a wood-fired cooker as well, and so we just bring firewood in every 15 minutes and throw it in there to keep the temperature up.

And we're boiling for a couple hours at that point, and then we're taking syrup off the whole time.

- So what do you have to keep the temperature at?

I mean, obviously boiling, but hotter than that or can you burn it?

Is it gonna have smoke flavor to it, or anything, or?

- If you keep a syrup the correct depth in your pans, it's really difficult to burn.

We're usually running it at an inch to inch and a half in the pans, so you can't really burn it at that.

But usually we run the cooker extremely hot.

We have a temperature gauge on the stack, the smoke stack behind, it's usually running about 1,000 degrees at that point on the gauge.

So it's quite hot, but the hotter it is, the quicker it cooks, and so you wanna do it in a time that it's not gonna take forever.

- Again, you get to efficiency.

Every time, you keep going back to that as your theme.

And then, I mean, is this something that you're just surprised that you came up with this idea?

It's like, "Well, we've got all this available to us, let's do something with it," and look what it's evolved into.

- Yeah, I think I'm surprised by the response.

I think you don't really know when you're trying something that unique until you actually do it and kinda see how people respond in what they think of it.

And so far people have really liked it.

We sell out every year, usually by December.

So we make enough to have it available for the year, but we always sell out, and we're always making a little more, it seems, every year.

So the demand is continuing to rise for it.

- Okay, the optimal time then to tap the trees is like February and March around here?

- Yeah.

- There's nothing in the fall or?

- [Jacob] You technically can do it in the fall because you will get to the right freeze-thaw window in the fall, but it's a smaller timeframe.

And we've never done it in the fall, we just do it in the spring, in February and March, like you said, that is about perfect conditions in Central Illinois.

- Okay, and then you're selling it.

I only found out about it 'cause my neighbor gave me a little bottle of it for Christmas.

It was great, and I went, "Ah, where's this from?"

But so you sell it, and then those proceeds go back into the whole operation or what?

- Yeah, yeah, those proceeds are part of the Camp Wokanda operating budget.

And so that helps out the camp quite a bit, especially during a time where there's not a whole lot else going on.

- Okay, well, what other things do you want to do at Camp Wokanda other than maple syrup?

Do you have any other things that you are incubating in the back of your head?

It's like, "Okay, well, I think we could try this or."

Parks and recreation background, you might have a little something up your sleeve.

- No, that's.

(laughing) (Christine laughing) - [Christine] That's it for now?

(Christine laughing) - That's it for now.

We wanna continue to grow the rental side of things as well, because you still find people that you talk about Camp Wokanda and they're like, "Oh, you mean the Boy Scout camp?"

And it's like, "Well, no, it hasn't been a Boy Scout camp for over 20 years now."

So people still aren't quite sure that it's not a Boy Scout camp, and we wanna make sure that people continue to know that, yeah, you can come out there and hike around and rent the cabins and camp and do all that fun stuff.

- Yeah, yeah.

Well, that's good that you've, help it grow and grow and grow.

Who is usually buying, let's get back to the syrup, who's usually buying the syrup or?

I mean, people who come to Forest Park Nature Center, and who else?

- Well, typically, we'll do the kickoff sale at the Forest Park Nature Center's Earth Day.

And this year, it'll be April 22nd, the Saturday.

And so we'll sell typically about half our stock at that sale there, and then we'll keep it stocked in the gift shop that they have there at the Nature Center until it sells out in December.

It's just usually families, people around the area that hear about it and will buy it, yeah.

- And how many gallons do you make a year?

- This year was our best year we've had, we did 120 gallons made.

The other really interesting partnership that we've had over the past two years has been with Rhodell's Brewery.

And the last year and this year, they've gotten some sap and syrup to make special spring batches of beer.

And the most popular one has been the Camp Wokanda Maple Wheat.

And they're going to do that again and launch that in the middle of April along with Earth Day.

- Okay, and that's a partnership you didn't see coming?

It just came outta nowhere?

- It just did, yeah, yeah.

I think one of the employees that goes down there had mentioned it to the owner, and the owner said, "Aw, it'd be a great," he's a kind of a local guy, likes to do local ingredients, and people really liked it when he did it last year.

- So you know a lot more about maple syrup and everything that can be done with it than anything.

So, okay, let's say, can you make maple candies, or maple sugar candies, or anything as well in the future, or does it all have to go to syrup?

- Yeah, you could, there's a lot of different maple products, maple candies, maple sugar, and those sorts of things, maple cream even.

But we're still kinda just meeting the demand of maple syrup that we haven't really found the extra time and ability to branch out further than that.

- Mm-hmm, and you said, so how many people do you have working during maple syrup season?

- Yeah, for the camp staff, it's just myself as full time, and then two part-time employees, and then a handful of volunteers that really like the process and like to help out in the kitchen.

- Mm-hmm, and are they finding out anything knew?

And do they have anything to offer on, again, getting back to efficiency, that things could be done better than you're doing 'em now or?

- Yeah, a lot of those volunteers are just retired folks that like to stay busy and sorts of things.

One of 'em does have kind of an engineering mind, he's always recommending like, "Oh, what if we did this and that to improve efficiency and whatnot?"

So I always appreciate his input.

But yeah, it's just, it's always interesting when you get different people together and to find out what kind of ideas they have.

- So the reverse osmosis thing, was that his idea or that's just some place where maple syrup making is going right now?

Is it a process that is becoming more popular?

How'd you find out about it?

- Yeah, yeah, it is kind of, if you ever, any commercial maple syrup operation that you're gonna see in like the Northeast or whatnot is gonna have reverse osmosis as part of its operation, just because you can gain so much efficiency with a machine like that.

And so after the first year we had done production, we didn't have reverse osmosis, and it just took so long.

- [Christine] And that's what you said, yeah.

- And so we thought, "Well, it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend all this time, even if we're making a really incredible product, we're not gonna have any margin at the end of it if we're spending all this time just cooking and cooking and cooking."

(Christine laughing) So we just did some research, and we found that, and we pitched the idea to my supervisor, and he was like, "Okay, let's give it a shot."

- And it's been working really well.

- [Jacob] Oh, it's working great, yeah.

- Yeah.

Do you wanna get any bigger than the 200 trees that you're tapping right now?

Would you like to expand a little bit, or what do you think the future holds there?

- I think there's definitely room for expansion.

We have the trees at camp, it just depends on can we allocate more personnel, time and whatnot to doing that process in the spring.

- Well, maybe you need to get back to the Boy Scouts and bring some of them in so that they can work on their badges and they can help with the process.

I mean, come on.

- (laughing) Yeah, yeah.

(Christine laughing) - It seems like a logical thing.

- Yeah, the Scouts are always very helpful, and I always appreciate their help when they do out at the camp.

We've had a lot of Eagle Projects out at camp, which is usually improvements that a Scout of high rank leads to make the camp better, either on trails, or that sort of thing.

- Mm-hmm, well, what do people not know about Camp Wokanda, you said, in terms of the services?

So you can have wedding receptions and you have cabins for people to sleep in, and how many people can stay in a cabin at a time?

Do you have certain restrictions, certain amounts of numbers of people that can be in per cabin?

- Yeah, so we have eight cabins total.

Four of them have a sleeping capacity of 12 and four of 'em have a sleeping capacity of 20.

Now, the cabins are a bit on the rustic side.

They have lights and electricity for amenities and access to the central shower house at camp.

But then there's also the lodge, which is a little bigger building, but it has a kitchen and restrooms in there, as well as an upstairs sleeping quarters for 18.

And that's very popular for Scouts and families and that sort of thing, and maybe small weddings as well, we'll use that building, because it has a little nicer amenities than the cabins do.

And then the big wedding building is the dining hall.

So that one usually runs from May to the end of October, where we'll have quite a few, usually about 20 or so wedding receptions inside the dining hall building.

- And how do people know about that?

I mean, I've lived here a long time and I had no idea.

- Yeah, the word is continuing to get out, which is great, 'cause when I first started there, 12 years ago.

- [Christine] Again, it was the Boy Scout camp.

- It was the Boy Scout camp, and you'd have weekends when no one would be camping out there, and that's not the case anymore, it's always busy on the weekends.

But I think the weddings were pretty slight back then too, but they continued to grow.

And after you get 200 people coming to a wedding, then there's always somebody that's like, "Oh, well, this place is really great, maybe we should have our wedding out there," so.

- Right, right.

Well, so that's kind of fun.

So you're really growing Camp Wokanda as a destination right now too, not only a syrup-making operation, but a destination for people who wanna get out and do things and be with nature.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, we really think nature is essential for both physical and mental health, and the connection with that is really important.

So we're always encouraging people to come on out, use the trails, hike around, bring your dog.

- Oh, it's dog friendly too, pet friendly?

- Oh yeah, you can have a dog out there, as long as it's on a leash, we love having dogs out there.

And lots of people like to bring their dogs, or come camp for the weekend with the family.

And the kids always love it and all of that.

- Mm-hmm, so the cabins don't have kitchens though, so people have to bring their own food, or do they?

- Yeah, they do not have kitchens.

- Okay.

- So yeah, it's a step up from tent camping, but at least you have a solid roof over your head.

If it rains, it's a lot easier to handle than a wet tent.

- Right, and then you said there's a shower house, so that's where the bathrooms are too?

- Yeah, yeah, you have.

- You get to go outside to go to the bathroom, kinda like an outhouse back in the day.

- (laughing) Yeah, yeah.

- But real toilet seats.

(Christine laughing) - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep.

- Big difference.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- Well, how many families are coming out and taking advantage of it?

And how are you getting the word out?

- Well, we do a lot of more electronic marketing than we used to in the past, and that really helps.

In terms of weddings, there's a lot more wedding sites that we're on these days as well.

And yeah, we're always encouraging people to, "Hey, tell your your friends and family if you had a good time here."

We have a lot of repeat users as well.

And sometimes, over Thanksgiving or Christmas, the same family that's been coming out for 10 years will come on out to use the lodge instead of having their Christmas party at their house, and it works great for that too.

- Right, yeah.

Well, and that's nice.

And it's for people who really like rustic.

I mean, there's nothing fancy, you don't have all those bells and whistles, but you're back in touch with your roots.

- Yeah, yeah, I mean, that comes with buildings that were built in the '30s and '50s, that they're all fairly rustic, but it's a great feel to have materials of wood and stuff that's not as common as it used to be for wall finishings and whatnot.

And it really gives you that kinda natural connection that we're going for out there.

- So you're happy that you moved here from Michigan after all of this?

- Yeah, I really like Peoria.

It's a very diverse city, and the landscape is a lot of woods and they got the River Bluff and the river, which is so beautiful.

And it's large enough that it has enough amenities that you really enjoy, but small enough where you can still get across town in like 20 minutes, yeah.

- Exactly.

Yeah, so, okay, and then one thing, so do you have any flying squirrels at Camp Wokanda?

Have you seen 'em?

- I have not seen any flying squirrels out there.

(laughing) - Okay, (clapping) I keep hearing about 'em and everything, and I haven't seen any either.

But keep an eye out for 'em, would you, please?

- [Jacob] (laughing) I absolutely will.

(Christine laughing) - All right, so next year's yield, does it depend on what the winter is leading up to it that you get the most sap, or what's gonna happen in the next year, you think?

- Yeah, that's hard to tell because it depends on the previous growing season.

So if it's a good growing season, from spring to fall, when the tree has its leaves, then the sugar content in the sap will be higher.

But you never know until it's all done, it's kind of a guess.

And we have tools that measure sugar content at the beginning of the season, so we kinda have an idea of what it's gonna take to get the syrup that we did last year.

But it's all up to nature, so that's kinda one of the fun, intriguing parts of it.

You do the same work every year, but a lot of it's just kind of a mystery because it's up to nature, and nature's like that.

- All right, and how much syrup are you consuming at home then?

(Jacob and Christine laughing) - Well, it depends on the week and depends on how many pancakes we have, but yeah, I usually will go through at least a gallon in a year.

So we like it very much.

- And it takes, what did you say, like 10 gallons to make a quart or something like that?

- Yeah, 10 gallons to make a quart, 40 gallons to make a gallon of syrup, yeah.

- Wow, I don't think we drink, (laughing) "Drink," listen to me, I don't think that we consume a gallon of syrup a year, but I don't know, maybe I better start paying attention.

This is liquid gold.

(Jacob laughing) - Yeah, yeah.

(Christine laughing) - Well, thanks so much for sharing the story and for not sugarcoating anything.

Get it?

(laughing) (Jacob laughing) Just threw that in there.

And telling us all about Camp Wokanda.

- Well, thanks for having me, it's been great.

- Lots of opportunities there.

All right, and thank you for joining us.

Don't forget, if you need some syrup, it's locally grown, locally made, and pretty tasty, I gotta say that.

So again, thank you for being here.

Thank you for being here.

Stay safe and healthy, and hold happiness.

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