Could the syrup for your waffle soon come from Washington state maple trees? Just maybe
In a forest north of Olympia, blue tubing is tautly strung between bigleaf maples. Inside, ribbons of liquid slowly snake their way downhill.
It’s a brisk late January day. The tree tops sway wildly from an approaching front. Down below, the forest floor is calm as Patrick Shults pauses a moment to watch the maple sap flow in the system he’s set up at the Meyer’s Point Environmental Field Station on Henderson Inlet.
The thermometer dipped to 26 degrees overnight, but now it’s warm and that means the sap is flowing beneath the bark of the bigleafs and out through more than 200 taps. It’s all headed nearly half a mile away to a sugar shack where it will be reduced, boiled and eventually become sweet maple syrup ready for a hot waffle.
Shults, a forester for the Washington State University Extension, created the syrup operation as part of a joint research project between WSU and the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. They’re studying if a maple syrup industry is possible in our maple-rich yet syrup-lacking state.
UW has several other maple research sites around the state, including at the Pack Forest near Eatonville. Meyer’s Point is the only WSU site and is focused on public education.
Whether maple syrup in Washington takes off or not, it’s getting attention.
“I’ve never seen people be so interested in the topic,” said UW professor Kent Wheiler. “They love maple.”
WHERE THE SAP FLOWS
Washington’s agricultural industry is known for wheat, apples, grapes and other products. Maple syrup isn’t one of them.
There’s only one syrup business in the state: Neil’s Bigleaf Maple Syrup in Acme, Whatcom County.
It’s not for a lack of maples. There are two species native to Washington: Bigleaf and vine. Vine maples, a distant relative of Asian maples, are too small to tap. Bigleafs, often growing with multiple stems, offer many opportunities to insert a tap.
In the maple-syrup regions of North America, the sugar maple is the species of choice. It doesn’t have any advantages over the bigleaf except one: The sugar content of its sap, 2.5 percent, is roughly twice that of the bigleaf.
Numerically, that translates into only a 1.2 percent difference. It might not seem like much but that means producers need to collect twice as much bigleaf sap to produce the same amount of syrup as someone in Quebec does.
It’s like raising twice the head of cattle to get the same steak.
Maple sap is 97-99 percent water. The rest is amino acids, minerals, vitamins and sugar in the form of sucrose. When most of the water is boiled off, it’s the sugar and organic compounds left behind that give it that maple flavor.
Sap flows in a maple after it’s been subjected to freezing temperatures and then thaws. In the northeast, those temperatures can last weeks. In Washington, it might just be a day.
“They are waiting for the thaw,” Shults said. “We’re waiting for the freeze.”
That makes sap flows in Washington harder to predict. Shults harvested sap three times last winter and twice so far this winter.
Shults produced just three gallons of syrup at Meyer’s Point last winter where the Michigan native serves as the facilities manager.
It doesn’t seem like much but that syrup, rare and unique, is worth $300 a gallon, he said.
This season, he’s collected 2,000 gallons of sap from 250 taps and has so far doubled his syrup output.
Shults gives it out as small samples at workshops and to people interested in the process.
“Most people have never tasted it,” he said. “And most people don’t know that it’s unique and different than the traditional stuff.”
Meyer’s Point’s maple grove sits on a hillside above a riparian zone. The sap flows through food grade tubing to the sugar shack. This year, Shults added a pump to assist the process.
The project will determine if pumps are worth the investment for small producers, Wheiler said.
The maple grove Shults taps is mostly younger trees, each with multiple stems. He leaves the gigantic old growth maples alone.
“I don’t tap them out of respect because they’re so big and beautiful,” he said.
Bigleaf maples are in decline in many areas around the Pacific Northwest. Recent research shows that climate change and urbanization are playing a part in their demise.
Shults often get asked, does tapping hurt a tree?
“The answer is technically, yes,” he said. “I like to compare it to giving blood.”
He says the tapping and sap removal is similar to a pruning wound and reduces growth by less than 5 percent.
THE BUSINESS OF MAPLE SYRUP
When a colleague of Wheiler’s urged him to apply for a USDA research grant on maple syrup in 2019, it caught him by surprise.
“Why would we apply?” he asked. “We don’t make maple syrup.”
But the idea intrigued him, and the school was awarded the grant for just under $500,000. Another $500,000 grant in 2021 helped expand the project at Meyer’s Point. The schools wanted to know what an initial investment would look like for a small producer.
They also wanted to know, when the syrup was ready to pour on a waffle, was it really worth it?
It turns out there’s benefits for maple forest land owners.
Bigleafs are often seen as nuisance trees for timber growers, taking up valuable land that can better be used to grow Douglas fir and other sawmill-ready species.
Maples like to grow along rivers and areas that are frequently wet — land that is less suitable for timber species but invaluable as a natural resource.
Turning an unprofitable maple grove into one of value can help preserve natural spaces from what forest managers euphemistically call conversion: the development of forests into buildings.
“By having maple revenue on some of their land, particularly riparian zones, small forest owners have that much more ability to stay as forest owners,” Wheiler said.
It’s too soon to tell if maple syrup production in Washington will be a hobby, like beekeeping, or a profitable business.
Getting the word out is part of Shults’ job. A webinar he led in January attracted over 200 Washington landowners. In fall, he’ll give hands-on maple syrup workshops.
BOILING AND TASTING
At Meyer’s Point, after the sap makes its journey from the maple grove to the sugar shack, it’s stored in barrels. But, not for long.
Shults usually processes the sap the same day he collects it. If he waits too long, bacteria will grow. While processing the sap will kill those germs, an off taste will remain.
“My biggest mistake has always been letting the sap sit too long,” he said. “It’ll start to ferment. You can smell it.”
The bacteria growth is exacerbated by warm weather. It’s a problem northern maple syrup producers don’t usually have to contend with.
“We really have a lot more pressure to process quickly,” Wheiler said.
As the sap dribbles into a holding tank, Shults opens a tap and pours out a glass. It’s slightly yellow and tastes like water with a few drops of maple syrup added to it.
The processing begins with a reverse osmosis machine that increases the sugar content to 8 percent by removing about 90 percent of the water.
The reduced liquid is then put in an evaporator. Think small stainless steel bathtub with a wood fire underneath. It takes Shults a few minutes to get the fire going.
Soon, clouds of steam are roiling off the evaporator as the water leaves the sap. Shults removes the liquid when it gets to about 50-55 percent sugar.
Shults finishes the syrup on his stove. He aims for 66-68 percent sugar to make it shelf stable.
Compared with northeastern maple syrup, the bigleaf is darker. But it’s just as sweet and mapley with flavors that are hard to describe.
“I’ve heard people say molasses, caramel, vanilla,” Wheiler said.
Wheiler has tasted syrup from different sites in the state. There’s a variety in flavors, he said.
Shults admits his pancake intake has increased slightly since he began the project, but he likes the syrup best for cooking and a certain libation.
“I will also say that it’s very good in an old-fashioned,” he said. “But, I have to limit myself.”
This story was originally published February 6, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Could the syrup for your waffle soon come from Washington state maple trees? Just maybe."
