Champoeg Creek Bigleaf Maple Syrup
I don’t know if my dad was the first person to start making bigleaf maple syrup in Oregon. Probably not. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kalapuya did it first. But back in the 90s, when everyone still thought it couldn’t be done and that there wasn’t any sugar in the bigleaf, he would go out most winters with a couple of buckets and spiles and an antique hand drill and tap the two huge bigleafs in our front yard. They were old even then; probably planted when the house was built in the early 1900s. He’d boil down the clear sap for hours (and hours and hours) until we got a couple of cups of delicate syrup out of it to use on our sourdough pancakes.
I wasn’t old enough to really appreciate it how special the stuff was at the time, but it stuck in my mind, and when my wife and I moved out to the farm where we currently live and I discovered that the forest was full of bigleaf maple, I decided to give it another shot. I bought fifty taps from Smoky Lake Maple Products in Wisconsin and set up a bunch of buckets out in the woods. The results were better than we could have imagined. It was awesome. Buttery, complex, rich, refined, incredible depth of flavor, a little smoky (I do all my evaporating over a maple wood fire); it made normal store-bought maple syrup taste boring. I was hesitant to give it too much credit at first, figuring I was probably biased because I had put so many hours of work into it, but every single person who tried it gave me the same look: Holy smokes. That is extraordinary. So I’m going to try to sell it.
As I mentioned, I cook all my syrup in small batches over a fire of maple wood. Everything is done by me, by hand. In the northeastern United States, maple syrup season typically starts when things begin to thaw out in March, but because of our gentler winters here in the Pacific Northwest, I’ve found we get several distinct runs of sap starting at the end of December and wrapping up when the sugar maples are just kicking off in the rest of the country. (My theory is that the milder climate contributes to the incredible flavor of bigleaf syrup.) 2023-2024 was an astoundingly bad syrup year for me because it froze too little and too late here, but I’m planning to be back with a vengeance next winter. I’d like to increase my number of taps and maybe invest in a nice evaporator stove to cook it on. We’ll see how it goes; I don’t want to overextend.
My family has lived in Oregon for six generations, so to be involved with something that I think has the potential to become a unique part of our state’s heritage is a tremendous honor - especially to be doing it just a couple of miles from Champoeg, the 1843 birthplace of Oregon. I’ve got a feeling that we’re making Oregon history again, turning something the rest of the world thought was impossible into a Northwest tradition that will never be duplicated or rivaled - not least because the bigleaf maple doesn’t grow anywhere else in the world except west of the Cascades. It’s up to us. So if you’ve got a couple of maple trees in your yard, buy yourself some taps and get to work. The more, the merrier.
Feel free to contact me directly at bigleafsyrup@gmail.com.
