Helms Sugar Shack

The smell hit me right as I arrived at Helms Sugar Shack—warm, earthy, sweet. Mahlon (46) was heating up about 80 gallons of pure maple syrup as part of his weekly bottling production.

Each year as the Midwest hints at Spring, the Helms family and crew will drill and insert between 4,000 and 6,000 taps, or spiles, into the sugar maples of Wisconsin’s northern woods.

“Back when we started, we were hanging sap bags off all the trees.” says Helms.

 

Now, thousands of feet of tubing stretch across the land, connecting trees to large, 300-gallon collecting barrels where the sap will eventually be picked up and boiled down over many days and hours. Different sugar content will determine how much sap it takes, but it can be anywhere from 30/40 gallons of this tree sap to make just one gallon of syrupy goodness!

Since 2008 officially, but long before that, Mahlon Helms worked to harvest the sugar bush in his home of Barron, WI. As a young boy he turned a small profit tapping and making syrup from the trees right in his own backyard. His father, a dairy farmer, informed him that he could harvest those trees but wouldn’t make a living doing it.

Here he is some 30 years later, running a profitable business that supports his family! Helms is still expanding and even able to offer work to some of the other farmers in the area.

Helms invited me out and walked me through the entire process over the course of a few visits to his property. I had the chance to watch thousands of gallons of raw sap get pumped into what he calls the sap house—an old, repurposed grain bin where the real magic happens.

Inside, wood from mostly fallen maple trees is burned to generate the heat needed to process the sap. Through a method involving reverse osmosis and evaporation, the raw sap is slowly reduced until all that remains is pure maple syrup.

This year (2025) was a record-breaking season for Helms—he processed over 89,000 gallons of sap! You can find his syrup stocked in many co-ops throughout the Twin Cities and surrounding areas.

Support your farmers.

Local hands. Honest work. Real food.