Sunday, February 27, 2000
Syrup producers rare in area
BY LEW MOORES
The Cincinnati Enquirer
ANDERSON TOWNSHIP — The sugar bush is off in the woods behind the house, stretching across the hillsides, a natural grove of sugar maples thick enough to take a tap and produce the clear liquid that will be cooked and boiled down into thick, sweet amber syrup.
The sugar maples on the Motz property in Anderson Township are fairly young trees — about 50 years old, 550 of them on eight acres — and are connected with spiles and plastic blue tubing that carries the sap down and over Clough Creek, which runs clear this time of year, and on into the sugar house.
There are no buckets, just seven miles of blue tubing that have the woods wired like an elaborate, rustic IV. On those days when freezing nights have yielded to warm, sunny days, the sap runs with some authority.
It is on those days Matt Motz Sr. and his cousin Edmund Motz produce maple syrup, the treasure left when the sap is boiled and its water content evaporated. Forty gallons of sap will give up one gallon of syrup.
Motz family members are probably the only commercial producers of maple syrup in Hamilton County, and they are one of two families that are known to produce it at all in the county.
“We got about 100 gallons last year,” said Matt Motz, as he sat in the sugar house while Edmund filled each pint bottle, one by one, with syrup. “We've done 200 gallons, but 200 would be a pretty bodacious year.”
The Motz family production, along with that of Dick and Willie Schorr, who live just north of Montgomery and produce maple syrup on their five acres, are a drop in the bucket in an industry in Ohio that produces 80,000 to 100,000 gallons a year, a $2.5 million business in the state.
Ohio once led the nation in maple production, back in the late 1800s to the turn of the century, producing a half-million gallons of syrup, a business centered in the northeastern portion of the state, especially in Geauga County.
There the tradition runs deep and the climate cooperates, frigid nights and warm days running into March. But beginning in the early 1900s, the tradition was compromised by deforestation, development, and urban and suburban sprawl.
Today, Vermont leads the country, followed by New York. Ohio now ranks fourth, behind Maine and ahead of Michigan and Wisconsin. The states of the Northeast stretching across the Great Lakes area, along with Canada, are the only places in the world that produce maple products. The English tried, and weren't successful, and the Japanese fared no better.
In this country, about 4,900 maple producers will process about 920,000 gallons of syrup a year. But the king producer is Canada, where 12,000 producers turn out more than 2.2 million gallons each year.
Maple production was a process discovered by Native Americans and refined by the first French and English settlers here. Native Americans produced it and probably used some of it for trade. During the 1800s, during a public outcry against slavery, Northeastern states and southeastern Canada refused to import cane sugar from the West Indies, because it was the product of slave labor.
“They did not buy an ounce that was shipped up by sailboat from the West Indies, because they wouldn't promote slave labor,” said Dick Schorr, who is president of the Ohio Maple Producers Association, an organization of about 225 producers.
Mr. Schorr — who calls himself a hobbyist, has about 150 sugar maples and produces about 30 gallons a year — said he knows of a producer in Clermont County, a couple in Warren County, but none in Butler County.
Dick and Willie Schorr began producing maple syrup about 10 years ago, after discovering sugar maples on their property. They produced it in the kitchen, two or three gallons, enough for family and friends. They expanded about six years ago to the garage, which they modified, installing a wood-fired evaporator.
Mr. Schorr splits and stacks his own wood, collects the sap in jugs, and he and his wife will haul between four and five tons of sap to be processed each season.
They don't advertise, don't really market their product, selling to people who venture by their driveway knowing they sell it. They also speak to school groups about maple production, and Mr. Schorr would like to start a beginner's seminar here, figuring western Hamilton County and Butler County are good candidates for maple production.
MAPLE EVENTS
Hamilton County Park District celebrates maple sap season with events at Farbach-Werner Nature Preserve in Colerain Township and at Sharon Woods in Sharonville.
Maple Sugar Days takes place today at Farbach-Werner, noon to 5 p.m. Visitors can learn how maple trees are tapped.
Visitors can also learn about how a maple tree is tapped at Maple Trees and Tales at Sharon Woods from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. Saturday.
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