Tapping time: Camp Agape hosts annual Maple Syrup Festival
Photos: Courtesy of Alex Covi
An evaporator in the sap shack at Camp Agave removes water from sap, an important part of the process of making syrup. Camp Agave will host a maple festival on Saturday.
Courtesy Alex Covi
Camp Agave in Mt. Pleasant Township is hosting its 10th annual Maple Festival on Saturday. The camp tapped more than 200 trees this year to produce its fresh syrup that is processed in its on-site sap shack.
Camp Agape, a Christian ministry camp in Mt. Pleasant Township, produces maple syrup from the maple trees on the 275-acre property. The camp hosts its 10th annual Maple Syrup Festival on Saturday.
Courtesy of Alex Covi
Some of the bottled syrup produced at Camp Agape in Mt. Pleasant Township from the maple trees on the campground
At Camp Agape in Mt. Pleasant Township, late winter is a sweet time, and not just because spring is around the corner.
The last weeks of the season are prime time for tapping maple trees on the Christian ministry camp’s 275 acres, and boiling the sap into delicious, sticky maple syrup.
On Saturday, Camp Agape will share some of the loot when it hosts the 10th annual Maple Syrup Festival from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
A free pancake and sausage breakfast, topped with the fresh maple syrup processed on site, will be served all day, and visitors can tour the grounds and take time to visit the sap shack to see how sap is transformed into maple syrup.
Erica Hardwig, coordinator of hospitality and community outreach, said the festival began as a way to connect with the community.
The “tour guides” will include Alex and Judy Covi, who are among a handful of dedicated volunteers who are responsible for the camp’s syrup production.
“They’ve become instrumental in making our syrup in the last decade. They know what they’re doing,” said Hardwig.
It might seem that making syrup – boiling off the water from sap to leave the sugar behind – is easy. But it’s not.
“It’s a labor-intensive, time-consuming process,” said Covi, a former physical science and biology teacher and principal who attended Camp Agape as a teen in the 1960s and began volunteering there after he retired.
It takes about 50 gallons of sap to produce a single gallon of syrup.
The sap can only be harvested from trees during the late winter months, when nighttime temperatures are below freezing and daytime temperatures are above freezing, which gets the sap flowing.
In Southwestern Pennsylvania, that is generally during a six-week window from February into March.
This year, Covi and camp volunteers tapped more than 200 Norwegian and sugar maple trees – drilling a small hole in the tree and inserting a tap, called a spile, into the tree with a bag to catch the drips.
In past years, some of the trees have produced up to 30 gallons of sap during the season.
“Most of our trees are Norwegian maples; they’re the worst producers,” said Covi. “You have to boil them a lot more.”
Syrup production is a messy affair, but it’s fascinating, and Camp Agape welcomes visitors to watch, learn, and taste at the festival.
The camp’s sap shack houses a reverse osmosis filter to extract some of the water and an evaporator. Stacks of dried wood feed the fire.
The syrup production has come a long way since the early days, when Covi and volunteers walked around the property carrying five-gallon Igloo coolers to collect sap.
Now, they drive quads and hang durable plastic sap bags on the trees.
“When we started out, we had three buffet stainless-steel serving trays on an open fire, and we kept ladling and ladling and ladling, and at the end of a day, we might get a gallon of syrup,” recalled Covi. “Those pieces of equipment we have in the shack now help immensely.”
The results are sweet, delicious syrup.
Covi said the product has gotten better over the years, as he and the volunteers learn more about making syrup.
“Our syrup is very good. It’s excellent. The first couple years it had a smoky taste, it was dark, it might have been a little weak. But once you get into it, you start reading about it, you talk to people and start comparing notes, you learn a lot,” said Covi. “Because of the equipment we have and because we are more knowledgeable now than five years ago, our syrup is very good.”
On Saturday, Covi also will make maple candy. For a donation, visitors can take some syrup home.
Wagon rides also will be available, Hardwig said.
Covi said the camp, which provides summer camping programs and retreat facilities, is one of his favorite places to spend time.
“When us old-timers get together, we say Camp Agape is the greatest kept secret in Washington County. For me, it was a great experience, and I got to do things no one in our area does,” Covi said, recalling overnight canoe trips, hikes, and cooking over a campfire. “It has always been, throughout my life, when the world was caving in on me, the place I could go back to and recall a joyful time in my life.”
He returned to Camp Agape for a 50th anniversary celebration nearly 10 years ago, and the director mentioned they were holding a volunteer work weekend the following week.
“I went out and I just kept going back, and here we are today,” said Covi. “I’m just a sap boiler. If it wasn’t for the help of several people and my wife – she knows as much about this as I do – I couldn’t do this.”
He’s hoping for good weather on Saturday.
“We have our good years and our bad years, depending on the weather,” said Covi. “If it’s raining, we don’t get a lot of people. If it’s 50 degrees, we won’t be able to handle the people.”