A Washington State University Extension webinar Jan. 12 will outline the goals for a regional effort to boost bigleaf maple syrup production.

Bigleaf maple trees are native to the region and could be used to develop new maple syrup production, said Patrick Shults, extension forester in southwest Washington and interim director of Lewis County Extension.

“Not a lot of people know that you can” produce syrup from the trees, Shults said. “Some people that know that you can, aren’t sure how to do it. It’s an interesting thing to do, whether it’s at the hobby scale, even all the way up to the commercial scale.”

Currently, one landowner in Washington is pursuing bigleaf maple syrup production commercially, Shults said.

The webinar is part of a larger project and partnership between WSU, the University of Washington and Oregon State University. The project uses USDA funding to continue a UW research project, Shults said. The next phase involves outreach, he added.

Shults said bigleaf maples are fewer today than they were before European settlement of the region. They have been “treated as a weed, more or less,” compared to industrial timber.

“A lot of your timber-minded people are going to be cutting them back,” he said.

The trees are more plentiful on small-scale  forest lands, whose owners tend to value biodiversity and habitat creation, Shults said.

“A lot of people are looking in their back yard and seeing a lot of maple,” he said. “Sometimes they hear that maple’s not really worth anything. This is a way to utilize it.”

Syrup from a bigleaf maple, compared to East Coast sugar maple, has a “bolder” flavor.

“Honestly, not everybody loves it, compared to the East Coast,” Shults said. “It’s a little stronger, it’s got kind of a vanilla and coffee flavor.”

The syrup may be better marketed as a separate product rather than competing with other syrup, Shults said.

“Some people do put it on their pancakes, but it actually goes for a pretty high price right now, so those are some pretty expensive pancakes,” he said.

Acme, Wash.-based Neil’s Bigleaf Maple Syrup sells 12 ounces of syrup for $42 and 5 ounces for $17.50.

The syrup is a little more common in British Columbia. Shults said there is some production in Oregon, too. 

The UW project was to determine whether maple production is viable, particularly for landowners using the maple tree in mandatory riparian buffers. Those landowners wouldn’t harvest the tree, but could tap them for syrup, Shults said.

More research is needed to determine the best management practices, he said.

“We have a lot of things going for us here, we also have some things going against us,” he said. “So we need to determine how to take advantage of those advantages and mitigate some of the disadvantages that we have.”

Contact Shults at patrick.shults@wsu.edu

https://forestry.wsu.edu/