Maple syrup from the Pacific Northwest? Bigleaf maple syrup industry is on the rise

Wesley Yank checks a sap bucket that hangs from a tree beside a waterfall at Camp Colton.

Watery sap drips slowly from a spout in the side of the tree, falling drop by drop into a silver metal bucket attached to the trunk.

The slightly sweet tree water is a nutritious drink, but this harvest is fated for something sweeter: Oregon-made maple syrup.

On a late January morning, temperatures in western Oregon had finally warmed enough for the sap in the maple trees to start running. Eliza Nelson, founder of the Oregon Maple Project, walked around the Oregon Maple Project’s property off the slopes of Mount Hood, gathering the sap into a big bucket, destined to be boiled down into thick, sweet syrup.

“It’s so exciting every time,” Nelson said, her bucket quickly filling up.

Bigleaf maple trees, found all over western Oregon and Washington, are easily identified in the summer and fall by their enormous, classically shaped leaves. They’re a close relative to the sugar maples, famous in the northeastern U.S. and Canada, which are used to make the world’s supply of maple syrup.

Eliza Nelson pours a bucket of fresh bigleaf maple sap into a collection bucket.

The Pacific Northwest isn’t known as maple syrup country, but a burgeoning syrup industry in Oregon and Washington is trying to change that perception, one gallon of sap at a time.

The Northwest’s more temperate climate and more watery maple sap make it harder to make syrup at a commercial scale. Producers can invest in technology, much of it developed in Canada, to improve their harvests, but that means steeper initial investments for farmers, and it doesn’t solve the fact that making bigleaf maple syrup still requires long, grueling hours that producers say can be a barrier to entry.

Because of that, the Northwest maple syrup industry has required more effort to get off the ground. But those passionate about local syrup say the delicious, boutique product is well worth the trouble.

Syrup too precious for pancakes

A tiny sugar shack sits in the forested land of Clackamas County off the southern slopes of Mount Hood. Inside, a long metal evaporator waits for sap. Outside, people gather on wooden benches beneath the western redcedar trees that ring the building. In the quiet of the forest, you can hear the constant whirring of a vacuum pump that slowly pulls sap from nearby maples, connected by hundreds of feet of plastic tubing.

Sap squirts out of a bigleaf maple tree as Wesley Yank, farm manager for the Oregon Maple Project, hammers a spile into the trunk.

The open-air shack, built at the privately owned Camp Colton, is home to the Oregon Maple Project, a nonprofit dedicated to educating the public about bigleaf maple syrup, encouraging hobbyists to pick up the craft and, hopefully, making the local syrup more available.

Nelson, director and founder of the Oregon Maple Project, said she first learned about bigleaf maple syrup about a decade ago, when she started tapping trees as a project for her fourth- and fifth-grade students. After she retired from teaching in 2020, she went all-in on syrup, starting the nonprofit to bring awareness to the product.

“I really wanted it to be a community venture and education focused,” she said. “Seeing other people discover it for the first time brings the sense of wonder right back to me.”

Virtually all maple syrup in the world is made from sugar maples, a tree found throughout the northeastern U.S. and Canada. Sugar maples produce sap with a high sugar content that is easy to cook down into syrup, and they thrive in a climate that is conducive to sap collection. Bigleaf maples, a close relative, also produce sweet sap, but the sugar content is much lower, Nelson said, requiring more effort to process it into the thick, sugary syrup that consumers expect.

The Oregon Maple Project, a nonprofit dedicated making syrup from bigleaf maple trees, is based out of a sugar shack in Colton.

The taste is also a little different. Visitors to the Oregon Maple Project, offered samples of bigleaf maple syrup next to sugar maple syrup, usually find the sugar maple syrup bright and sweet compared to the bigleaf maple syrup’s deeper, more complex flavor.

A bottle of Neil’s Bigleaf Maple Syrup, made in northern Washington. Neil’s is one of the biggest companies producing bigleaf syrup.

Because of that, and the fact that so little is produced, it’s not an everyday pantry item.

Sap drips out of a bigleaf maple tree as Wesley Yank, farm manager for the Oregon Maple Project, insets a spile into the trunk.

“It’s so precious that it’s not often used on pancakes,” Nelson said. “It’s more for cooking with.”

Those who make bigleaf syrup have said they use it as a glaze for fish or vegetables. Some stir it into their morning coffee or use it in cocktails. But with prices around $4 an ounce, it’s still considered a specialty product.

The Oregon Maple Project’s operation acts as a how-to for making bigleaf maple syrup. Every year, the nonprofit cobbles together a cohort of hobbyists who learn the process at Camp Colton, then go home to collect sap from trees on their own land. At the end of the season, frozen sap is cooked together in one big community boil, with the syrup divvied up among the participants.

While most participants in the Sugaring Collective might make small batches of homemade syrup on their own, a few start up commercial operations, with the goal of turning more people on to bigleaf maple syrup — and eventually turning a profit.

An exciting, exhausting new venture

In the Northeast, Indigenous communities have been making maple syrup for generations. Originally collected using wooden spiles, or spouts, sap is used to cure meats, sweeten bitter medicines or numb pain as an anesthetic.

Native peoples in the Northwest did not have the same practice.

According to “Native American Ethnobotany,” an exhaustive reference on Indigenous plant uses, only the Nlakaʼpamux people in southern British Columbia worked with bigleaf maple sap, drinking it as a tonic and sometimes boiling it into syrup. According to the tribe, only one remaining elder remembers the practice.

In other words, those making bigleaf maple syrup today are exploring largely uncharted territory.

Oregon farmers Connie and Dean Olsen were introduced to bigleaf syrup from what has proven to be one of the most common sources: a friend of a friend.

In 2022, Dean’s brother invited an Oregon State University researcher to the couple’s property, Condea’s Farm in Clatskanie, where the researcher showed them how to tap a few of their bigleaf maple trees. They set up a propane stove on the deck and watched for 10 hours as the sap slowly boiled down into syrup, the Olsens said.

“We thought it was pretty cool that you could even do it,” Dean Olsen said. “By the time they left, we were sold on giving it a try.”

In their first year, they put up a sugar house, bought an evaporator and set up 500 taps around their farm. Their yield was only enough to make about 7 gallons of syrup by the end of the season. But in year two, they borrowed a vacuum pump from Oregon State University and tried it on 10 of their trees.

“It was like night and day,” Dean said.

This year, with 400 taps on a vacuum pump, they’ve made 68 gallons of syrup — still a small haul but a huge improvement for their startup operation. If they sell out their supply, they’ll earn about $34,000.

It’s a nice bit of income, but a lot of it will go toward paying off $80,000 in startup costs.

But that investment, they said, has felt worth it to get on the ground floor of an emerging industry.

“It’s exciting; it’s something new here in the Pacific Northwest,” Connie said. “I think it’s eventually going to get really well known.”

As it stands, only a few farmers sell commercially in the Pacific Northwest. The Oregon Maple Syrup Products Association, which helps support the industry, has 14 members, almost all small-time producers. The Washington Maple Syrup Association is even smaller, with only three members. Most of those producers sell syrup online, at farmers markets or at select local shops.

Eric T. Jones, a scientist at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry who runs the school’s Bigleaf Maple Project, said people are pushing to grow a more robust industry, one that could someday put Pacific Northwest syrup on grocery shelves beside the stuff from Canada and Vermont.

But significant barriers remain.

Making syrup from bigleaf maples is not nearly as easy as making it from sugar maples, Jones said. Beyond the lower sugar content in the sap, there’s the Northwest climate to contend with.

Sap runs through the trees — and out into harvesters’ collection taps — during a thaw following a freeze. That process plays out with regularity in the cold, clear forests of New England, but Northwest forests are more unpredictable, with stretches of warm, damp weather between the freezes.

To overcome those obstacles, Northwest farmers need vacuum pumps that help pull more sap from the trees and reverse osmosis filters that increase the sugar content and allow for a shorter cooking time. Those tools make a profitable bigleaf maple syrup operation possible, but it doesn’t solve for producers’ heavy workload and consumers who have never heard of bigleaf syrup.

“We are confident that, yes, you can tap maple trees and make delicious tasting product like bigleaf maple syrup, but there’s no guarantees about how much money you can make off it or where the market is going to be in 10 years,” Jones said. “These are batch boutique products.”

Northwest producers also must contend with the potential for bacteria to build up in vacuum pump lines, a result of warmer temperatures between sap runs. Farmers said they’ve been struggling to clean out lines between runs.

“I think the reason more people don’t do it here yet … is because of the work factor,” Connie Olsen said. “It’s just a long process: the cleaning, the climbing up trees, everything is just so different here on the West Coast.”

Jones said there’s not a lot of data directly comparing the Northeast and Northwest industries, but the scope of the operations is telling. A large farm operation in the Northwest might tap 3,000 trees, while a large farm operation in the Northeast might have around 15,000 taps. The biggest sugar maple producers have more than 50,000 taps, Jones said — something Oregon and Washington producers don’t have the resources to match.

To put it in further perspective, Quebec, the world’s most productive maple syrup region, collectively produced more than 20,000 gallons of syrup last year from 55.5 million taps.

Now, Pacific Northwest farmers are focused on honing the craft. Nobody’s trying to compete with Vermont — they’re just trying to make good syrup.

Still, the effort has momentum. Oregon State University’s program, which began in 2020, was funded in large part through $600,000 in federal grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. With those funds, Jones and his colleagues have been giving local farmers the knowledge and equipment necessary to turn their backyard trees into a reliable income in the off season.

“There’s huge growth potential everywhere,” Jones said. “The prices are high, but people are willing to pay that to support farmers and the growth of this new industry.”

Neil’s Bigleaf is leading the way

If you’re looking for the picture of bigleaf maple syrup success, consider Neil McLeod.

McLeod, owner of Neil’s Bigleaf Maple Syrup in Washington’s Acme Valley, is widely regarded as the region’s most successful producer. He’s spent the past decade perfecting the craft and pulling the industry along with him.

What started as a hobby in 2011 quickly spun into a lucrative venture, McLeod said. By his third year, he got the attention of Canlis, a high-end restaurant in Seattle that he said offered to buy his entire supply. After that, he got licensed, increased his operation to 3,000 taps and went commercial.

“I’m pretty efficient at it. I’m doing well. I’ve solved a lot of the problems,” he said. “If I’m making money at it, other people will do it.”

McLeod, who has scaled back to 1,000 taps as he eyes retirement, said while Northwest maple syrup producers can’t make nearly as much as their Northeast counterparts, their specialty product sells at a much higher price: about $500 per gallon, compared with $60 per gallon back east. Because of that, he has focused on quality over quantity, making sure every bottle has the complex taste bigleaf maple syrup is known for.

That’s required a lot of work, he said.

“You have to be a bit of a mechanic; you have to be able to work out in the woods,” McLeod said. “When the sap’s running, you better be ready. You go to work and you don’t stop until it’s done.”

McLeod primarily sells online, where his syrup has been snatched up by people from around the country. One particularly big order went to the United Arab Emirates embassy in Washington, D.C., he said. Another big order ships to Canlis, which has been buying for years. He also sells bottles locally, including at one bakery near Acme.

“I’ve got a reputation and we try really hard to put out a good quality syrup,” he said. “I’ve got no problem selling mine.”

If anyone is up to matching Neil’s Bigleaf Maple Syrup, it’s Dan Caldwell, owner of Bigfoot Food Products in the Willamette Valley.

Caldwell, in his third season of production, has 2,500 taps on his Sheridan farm and so far this year has produced about 60 gallons of syrup. He said his vacuum pump operation could produce three times as much if not for bacteria contaminating his lines with this winter’s warm weather.

“We’re still figuring it out. We’re still in the research and development phase out here,” Caldwell said. “I’m pretty optimistic because it’s doable; we just have to figure out how.”

Bigleaf maple syrup producers are getting a lot of help. Jones and other researchers at Oregon State University are looking for more funding to continue their project, which is set to run through 2027. Washington State University also offers resources to local farmers. A few small investments have also come from Canadian companies looking to get involved in the burgeoning industry.

Meanwhile, the Oregon Maple Project, busy on its own land, will continue to educate as many people as possible about the joy and wonder of making Northwest maple syrup.

On that productive January morning, Wesley Yank, the project’s new farm manager, joined Nelson on making the rounds to the dozens of buckets hanging around the property. The weather had just begun to warm after a cold snap, and the sap was running better than they expected.

Yank, who has a background in food access programs, is still new to the world of maple syrup. But after their first season spent walking the woods, drilling tap holes into trees and collecting sap, they, like so many others, have quickly fallen in love with the world of bigleaf maple syrup.

For Yank, the experience borders on spiritual, they said. It’s about forming relationships with trees, learning to cook the mysterious liquid, and merging the natural world with the mechanical. With so much still unknown, they said, “You have to stay flexible and adaptable, curious all the time.”

“It just has a lot of joy to it, and I think that’s something our world has needed,” Yank said of making syrup. “For me it’s been one of the most fruitful winters I’ve had.”

©2026 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit oregonlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.