People may think of Vermont when they think maple syrup. But could there be an untapped commercial industry in the Pacific Northwest? Eric Jones is an assistant professor of practice in the OSU College of Forestry and is leading a project on bigleaf maple sap in Western Oregon. He joins us with details.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. If I say maple syrup, what state comes to mind? It’s probably not Oregon. Oregon’s trees aren’t for sap, so the thinking might go, but for pears or hazelnuts or Christmas. But researchers and landowners in Oregon say it’s time to reset those expectations, that the Northwest could actually be a site for commercial-scale maple syrup production. Eric Jones is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University. He joins us now. It’s good to have you on Think Out Loud.
Eric Jones: Hi. Thank you for having me.
Dave Miller: Thanks for joining us. So, let’s start with the basics here. What do you need to have in order to make maple syrup?
Eric Jones: Well you need to have maple trees and western Oregon has a lot of them. Any maple tree will produce sap with sugar in it, and all of it is edible. Bigleaf maples are really abundant in Oregon and they are a great source of sugary sap that you can turn into food products like syrup.
Dave Miller: What do you need weather-wise for good sap production? What’s the cycle that makes sap come out of a tree and get collected into a bucket?
Eric Jones: That’s a great question. You need freezing nights and warm days. And in the Northeast sugar maple industry, they often have freezing nights and days all winter long and they do their tapping at the end of winter. Typically in Oregon and other places in the bigleaf range like Washington and British Columbia and Northern California, we have more of a roller coaster of temperatures, from periodic freezing periods and warm days to lots of warm days. And so we’re learning how to adapt to these different kinds of conditions and how to do that with bigleaf maple.
Dave Miller: Is that good news for sap collection in the Northwest or is it more complicated than that? The way you’re describing it, it seems like in Vermont or New Hampshire or Quebec or wherever. Michigan, maybe. They know basically in the late winter or early spring when the sap is going to flow. It seems more haphazard in the Northwest.
Eric Jones: Yeah, possibly. That’s part of what we’re trying to learn. Is it an opportunity or more of a barrier? Are these frequent warm periods going to create more problems like bacteria in the system, which is unwanted? It creates an ‘off’ flavor in the syrup. If you look at last year, the Northeast had a terrible year. In many ways they have all their eggs in one basket. If the climate doesn’t line up well, then they can have a terrible season. In Canada, they have a national reserve to offset bad seasons. They had to dip into millions of gallons of syrup to offset the losses to all the many small farmers and foresters that feed into that system. So maybe in the Pacific Northwest, it’ll stretch out the risk and we’ll have more opportunities to tap and not have to worry about having a bad season at the very end.
Dave Miller: I’d forgotten about that. So, Canada has a national supply, just in case, for maple syrup. A national reserve, the way we have for petroleum products?
Eric Jones: Maple syrup is a major product in Canada. They have really grown an international demand for maple syrup. The government supports the risk that farmers have to take by having a national supply. In the United States, we have a long history of tapping, both hobby and commercial, and thousands of small producers do it. Part of the funding for my grant is through this program started in USDA, the Agricultural Marketing Service, to provide research and development money so Northeastern US producers can catch up and be able to produce more. There’s a lot of unanswered questions about how to tap, how to mitigate bacterial growth in the system, how to produce desired flavors and so this money, this investment by the government, is having a handsome payoff. We’re taking advantage of that funding here in the Northwest. Colleagues at the University of Washington also have a grant project going and they’re doing a little bit more of a controlled study approach in their research forest. I’m taking more of a landowner-based approach here in in Oregon, trying to really get lots of tapping going across different kinds of landowner systems and help involve the landowners and learning what works when, where and and how much can we make, and what are the barriers to commercialization. And I should mention I have a wonderful team of people… agro-foresters, economists, geographers… it’s just a great group of people and we’re really learning a lot.
Dave Miller: Let’s turn to taste though, because that’s what a lot of people care the most about. The Vermonters that I have known in my life, they are as proud of their maple syrup as Oregonians are about anything that’s grown or harvested here, Hood strawberries or hazelnuts or Dungeness crab or anything. Are those Vermonters right? Is there something special and specific about maple syrup from Vermont?
Eric Jones: Well, maple syrup from Vermont is absolutely wonderful. Delicious flavor and they are rightfully very proud of that. Syrup from bigleaf maple trees is similar. You have a maple flavor, you’ll identify it as ‘oh, that’s maple,’ but it’s different from eastern sugar maple syrup. The syrup has a more complex flavor, the bigleaf syrup. We’re just at the beginning of research to really understand why that is.
Dave Miller: When you say complex, what does it actually taste like for those of us who haven’t had it, which I think is almost all of us.
Eric Jones: Well, that’s a really hard thing to say because when you ask people what are they tasting, you’ll hear everything from butterscotch to cinnamon to all kinds of different profiles and taste sensations. We do plan to do more formal, rigorous tasting to kind of pin that down. But when people taste Northwest bigleaf maple syrup alongside eastern sugar maple syrup, tasters will often remark that the eastern sugar maple tastes much more like table sugar. That makes sense because the syrup is primarily sucrose, like table sugar. The sugar maple industry promotes consistency and colors, texture and flavors as goals. So it may be that, for bigleaf maple syrup, we will take a different path, one that is less standardized and that celebrates the wide diversity of flavors over homogeneity.
Dave Miller: We got this on Facebook from DGraf Thiessen who said, ‘I’d love to try Oregon made maple syrup and support local maple syrup production. Maybe even learn how to make it. We have big maples on our property.’ What can people who have their own bigleaf maples, what could they do to get in on this?
Eric Jones: So once COVID becomes less risky and we do more public events, people interested in bigleaf tapping can learn more and sign up for events with us. Right now, a good place to go to just to get a broad overview is our Oregon Tree Tappers website. That has lots of information there where people can get some of their basic questions answered. Then if they want to take the next step, and they’re thinking commercia,l especially encourage them to sign up. We have a simple form there and get in touch with us. But also if they’re just thinking of dipping a toe in and maybe just thinking of it more for fun, I encourage them to reach out to our nonprofit partner, the Oregon Maple Project, which has set up a wonderful training facility there to teach people how to do very basic community sugaring.
Dave Miller: What do you think the biggest challenges are going to be to get commercial scale production off the ground in Oregon or the Northwest?
Eric Jones: Well, fortunately there’s a couple of game changers that have happened in the last couple of decades. One is that in the Northeast, they’ve really developed very good special food grade vacuum tubing that can connect hundreds, even thousands, of trees together in an efficient way. The tubing has a long lifespan and it’s recyclable and very good stuff. Because bigleaf maple has less sugar content than sugar maple, like about a third, we need to get a lot of sap. We have to get more sap. Then a second technology that’s really important in this equation is the emergence of reverse osmosis technology which can concentrate sap. Reverse osmosis machines are commonly used to purify drinking water. This is accomplished by forcing the water through a membrane using a pump. In the maple industry, the same thing is done except the water is not kept. What we’re keeping is the concentrated sap that didn’t go through the membrane. So, that’s a big deal.
Dave Miller: So, the tree gets to keep its water, you get the sugar and you don’t have to boil down 80 gallons of sap to create one gallon of syrup.
Eric Jones: That’s right. We have taken the sap from the tree, but you never take more than a very small amount because a tap hole only gets just a little portion of the sap in the tree.
Dave Miller: Eric Jones, we have to leave it there, but thank you so much for joining us.
Eric Jones: Yeah, thank you.
Dave Miller: That’s Eric Jones, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University.
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