We discovered a little town up In the Northwoods that has 3 fantastic surprises. Welcome to Birnamwood, Wisco, (pop. 802) home to:1. An amazing OLD BAR Chet & Emils2. The worlds largest BADGER (once perched atop a cheese shop, now it guards a club of strippers)3. One of the best SUGAR BUSHES in the Midwest. (Ahem.. meaning a grove of maple trees.)Ive never admitted this to anyone before, but the 1st thing I did when we bought camp was start cruising eBay for antique maple sugaring buckets. I even had the packaging designed in my delusional head, having convinced myself that with 25 acres, we had to have a sugarbush tucked back in here someplace. Then David broke the news: not only does It take 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gal of syrup...but he could count all the maple trees here on 1 hand.I sulked for months. Fast-forward 16 years.The next best thing to making your own, is to convince your expert neighbors to the north to make it for you. Were finally getting to stock our kitchens & store with our own :Pure Syrup, made by Sippls SugarBush of Birnamwood, specially packagedfor Camp Wandawega.Family-owned Sippls in Birnamwood, Wis has been producing puremaple syrupfor generations. They take a certain pride in their history & craft that we admired so much, so we asked if they would partner up with us.In Wisco, maple syrup season started with families tapping their own backyard trees & a small cooking pan. Although the technology has evolved considerably, at Sippls the back-breaking work & care it takes to transform sap to syrup is the same as it is has been for hundreds of years. Its a local tradition that was celebrated by our great & great-grandparents as we do today.We cant wait to reveal the package design, which has been the biggest challenge. As it turns out, making things simpler with old fashioned methods is a lot harder than we could have imagined. (It took talking to manufacturers from MN to Canada).But as they say, nothing worth doing comes easy. Stay tuned.Photos:3,9,10 & excerpt by mnlocavore.com, with B&W shots of local sugaring from WisconsinHistory.org