Tapping Day on a recent Saturday was the annual revival of the seasonal process of syrup-making that began at St. John's in 1942. Kieffer led a parade of more than 75 volunteer students and staff from St. John's and the St. John's Arboretum through the tapping routine. Monks at the abbey in Collegeville, Minn., used to tap as many as 3,000 trees each spring, but this year, with fewer monks eating fewer pancakes, the group tapped 800 trees in about two hours.
"The hardest thing to do is to keep up with him," Jean Lavigne, a St. John's assistant professor in environmental studies, said of Kieffer, 62.
Over the next several weeks, Kieffer and the crews will repeatedly collect the sap buckets and dump the sap into 55-gallon drums. The sap will be hauled to the sugar shack, where it will be circulated and cooked in large pans over heat high enough to evaporate 200 gallons of water an hour. About 40 gallons of sap yield one gallon of syrup. Each tap, Kieffer said, produces about 10 gallons of sap.
Many large-scale syrup operations use systems of pumps and hoses to suck sap from the trees and move it to holding tanks. At St. John's, the only mechanical aids appear to be an old John Deere tractor for hauling supplies, and Kieffer's hole-driller, a 40-year-old chain saw modified with a 7/16-inch drill bit running out the side of the engine. On Tapping Day, only minutes after spikes were hammered into the trees, droplets of sap were already working their way to the lip of each spike. Each falling drop struck the bottom of its bucket like a gentle mallet, a drumbeat for spring.
There's no way to predict what kind of syruping season this will be. The recent warm weather has slowed the sap run a bit, said Sarah Gainey, environmental education coordinator for the St. John's Arboretum. But the sap will be good for syrup until the trees start making leaves in several weeks.
