At a certain point of every Minnesota winter, my brain seems to malfunction and I stop dressing appropriately for the weather. I'm not sure if it's because I've lost patience with the effort required to remember every weird place I've stashed the sibling to a sock. Or, more likely, because I've committed myself to a form of magical thinking where I wholeheartedly believe I can will an early spring if I only stop dressing appropriately and believe it into existence.

This past winter, it probably didn't help that we experienced an unprecedented number of unseasonably warm days. So for the third-annual outdoor pancake breakfast and sap boil at Martin Luther King Jr. park in southwest Minneapolis, it felt apropos to head out wearing a paper-thin felt jacket, an equally thin t-shirt and jeans, no socks, and no mittens.

None of this was warm enough. I shouldn't have assumed, during later winter, that wearing Chelseas and no socks — much less anything else — was anywhere moderately close to warm enough to sit on a park bench and attempt to eat pancakes.

But that didn't deter me. And it certainly didn't discourage anyone else. By the time I arrived at the breakfast, there was already a massive queue of people patiently waiting in line for their chance to sample syrup tapped from Minneapolis trees that included over a dozen Maples from the surrounding park. Others were happy to linger around other notable attractions:

• An arborist was dishing out advice at an old-fashioned "Ask an arborist" booth.
• A small crowd was amiably huddling around the warmth of a gleaming, wood-fired evaporator that I learned the Minneapolis Parks Department had just purchased this year.
• Near a tree stump, under the watchful gaze of parents, small children were learning to drill holes into the remnants of the tree with power tools and an old-fashioned crank.

I expected the people staffing these and other educational stations to somehow be much more outdoorsy than I am. Because I am not at all outdoorsy.

And Minneapolis is a place, after all, where citizens have successfully petitioned city park officials to sanction swimming in DIY ice holes in the dead of winter. Which is exactly as DIY as it sounds.

But — aside from the arborist — no-one at the event was an expert. Every individual I personally met, aside from an organizer, were homeowners who became volunteers to learn more about maple syrup and share in a community-driven, seasonal bounty. And each year, they interact primarily through an email list organized by the Urban Sap Tap Project. This pancake breakfast is the first time any of them meet.

To make it easy to participate, in addition to sponsoring the email list serve, the Urban Sap Tap Project distributes maple-syrup making kits to every volunteer. The kits include a collection bag, a spire (a small, metal funnel-like attachment that catches sap) and a tube; residents drill holes into their own trees to attach the kit and when sap collection kits are reasonably full, they return them back to a coordinator who works for the Minneapolis Parks Department, which sponsors and organizes the work of the Urban Sap Tap Project.

For six years, the program has only been open to homeowners — you can't tap public trees. Or at least, you couldn't until this year. In 2024, the parks board piloted a way to increase the accessibility of the project by allowing more than a dozen trees in Martin Luther King, Jr., Park to be tapped.

On your own, you could certainly attempt to create your own maple syrup. But without tools like the city's brand-new wood-fired evaporator, it might take more time than you're willing to invest. And most significantly, the yield may be disappointedly small.

One volunteer I spoke with shared that if he attempted to tap maple trees for their syrup on his own, the yield might only be a teaspoon. But together, in collaboration with other volunteers, each participant in the Urban Sap Project might end up with an entire pint. As a long-time renter with no foreseeable future as a homeowner, I'm not sure if I'll be able to participate in the project in future years. But it certainly excited me enough dig into the process of maple syrup making at the Urban Sap Project and document each step of the process.

1. Wait until conditions are just right

According to the Minnesota DNR, the dripping sap associated with Maple syrup season is a result of a pressure build-up that happens when sap repeatedly freezes and then thaws throughout the day.

More specifically, says the DNR, "Sap runs best when temperatures drop below freezing at night and rise into the 40s during the day." In Minnesota, the organization adds, these conditions typically happen in March — but sap can begin to flow much earlier or much later in the season. Once temperatures stay above freezing and leaf buds appear, however, the season is over.

2. Identify your trees

While maple syrup is famously associated with the Sugar Maple, any maple tree will do. The Urban Sap Project notes that Silver Maples are particularly common in the twin cities, and, like other maple trees as well as the common box elder, can absolutely be tapped for their syrup.

3. Set up a maple syrup tapping kit

Most starter kits contain a mix of the following:

• Blue or clear-plastic sap collecting bags
• Galvanized sap bag holders
• Metal spiles or spouts

To attach a spile to a tree, according to volunteers working with the Urban Sap Project, you will need to drill a 2.5 inch hole into the tree, which should be done at a slight angle. A power tool or a manual drill both will work (according to one volunteer, in fact, some participants in the project actually prefer the meditative qualities of a manual drill).

After attaching a spire to the tree, it should connect to a sap collecting bag. And once the sap bags are full, they can (and should, to prevent spoilage) be frozen until they are ready to be used.

4. Optional: Filter out water with reverse osmosis

According to the USDA, Maple sap is 98 percent water and 2 percent sugar. That 2 percent is what is served as syrup — but before that can happen, the water needs to be removed.

Before attempting to remove the water by boiling and evaporating it, the Urban Sap Project processes their community batches of sap with a reverse osmosis machine. If you had asked me before the pancake breakfast what reverse osmosis does, I would have had no idea.

I would have guessed it's the word for an extremely fancy machine that does things no hobbyist could manage.

The one used by the parks project is absolutely not the textbook definition of fancy.

And, despite its deeply DIY looks, it filters out as much as 50% of the water content from the sap, which — according to organizers — dramatically reduces the time required to transform it into syrup.

5a. Use a wood-fired stove to boil off any remaining water

The parks project has relied on an old-fashioned, wood-fired stove to boil off water from sap for several years. At the event it was kept busy — melting large chunks of frozen Maple sap while simultaneously keeping cold, frozen souls like myself a little bit warmer.

And as far as I can reasonably tell, about its ability to make maple syrup, it works.

But while wood-fired stoves are more energy efficient than an open fire, they are definitely not as effective as an evaporator.

5b. Boiling off remaining water — wood-fired evaporator

Just this year, the Urban Sap Project was able to buy a brand-new maple syrup evaporator and take it to task with their community-sourced batch of sap. With a much larger surface area, evaporators can make much quicker work of larger batches of sap.

But an evaporator might not make sure for a solo syrup enthusiast. Evaporators can cost several hundred to several thousand — and aren't likely to be something any one person, in a city, can justify purchasing for a small yield that might be under a teaspoon. As one volunteer put it, "we don't all need to purchase an evaporator for that, and don't want to".

So your mileage may vary — and it's common for enthusiasts with only a few trees to use a wood stove, an open fire, or even a grill or a Turkey fryer.