How a Minnesota man landed himself in the Maple Syrup Hall of Fame

    OTTER TAIL, Minnesota (WCCO) -- Springtime in Otter Tail County, Minnesota, means the woodlands are waking up. You'll find the usual plants and animals here, but on a property near Dent, you'll also find the unusual.

It's a series of blue lines zigzagging through the forest, stretching as far as the eye can see.

The lines belong to Stu Peterson and they're carrying sap from his sugar maples into containers that he'll haul to his sugarhouse.

"It looks like water and it acts like water with just a little bit of sugar in it," Peterson said.

Before any of the lines were here, this property was a boy's camp called Camp Aquila. Years after the camp closed, a friend talked Peterson and his wife into selling their St. Paul home and buying the land.

"That first year was buyer's remorse — what have we done? It's way too big. But it's the best thing we ever did," Peterson said.

That's because the Department of Natural Resources told him the property had untapped potential as a sugar bush — a shorter name for a maple syrup operation.

"I had no idea. You don't go to school for maple syruping in Minnesota. You can out east, but not here," Peterson said.

But he caught on quickly.

Each year, Peterson taps about 1,000 trees on his property. It takes about 30 gallons of sap to make one bottle of syrup.

The sweet spot is usually mid-March to mid-April, though last year, the mild winter allowed him to tap in mid-February. Set-up takes three weeks and once the sap starts to flow, it's taken into the sugarhouse where it's run through an evaporator.

"It's boiling and boiling, and it gets more and more concentrated as it travels down this river," Peterson said.

What comes out in the end is caramelized syrup with a high sugar content, but nothing else is added.

"That is the key to maple syrup. We are adding nothing," Peterson said.

It's sometimes called Mother Nature's nectar in a bottle — and if it's the right concentration and the right container, it can stay fresh for decades.

A local brewery has used Peterson's syrup in some of their beer and he's won blue ribbons across the country, but his biggest accomplishment was getting inducted into the International Maple Museum Hall of Fame in 2024.

"It's not quite the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but it's not bad for a city kid from St. Paul," Peterson said.

Now, the city kid from St. Paul wants to pour his knowledge into the next generation of syrup farmers.

"My mission in life, and I'll never get it done, is to help those people starting out do it right," Peterson said. "I want people to know what good syrup is and to strive to put it in a bottle."

Peterson's syrup is sold in stores in the Twin Cities, Otter Tail and Becker counties and even up in the Fargo-Moorhead area. It's worth noting that 80% of maple syrup comes from Canada.