- Sometimes I have to take a moment to look around and go, Holy cow, how did we get here?

It's been a long journey it's been rewarding, The problems don't go away, they just become more interesting.

But for the most part, there's this maple syrup wonderland and I get up every day excited to go to work.

(upbeat music) I am Nate Bissell.

I am a chief instigator and owner of Bissell Maple Farm.

Growing up, Dad always made syrup, I did not know it was in my family's history, then I found some old photos and my family has been making maple syrup for over 100 years in Ohio.

And that even gave me the maple syrup bug even more.

These are actually pictures from the 1800s.

They'd be my great grandfather and great great grandfather making maple syrup here in Northeast Ohio.

The only reason I sell maple syrup is so I get to make more maple syrup.

So I'm going to try to explain this from tree to table.

There's a lot of preparation even before you tap a tree.

So you want to be prepared for the first sap run.

So you need all of your tubing fixed, making sure everything's tight and drawn tight and is sloping the right way.

And then they go out and tap the trees.

(vehicle moving on the snow) We're going out there.

And we're looking for trees that will produce sap.

We're drilling a 5/16" hole.

(drilling) This year, we're at 9,600 taps, So it probably comes down to about 8,900 trees.

- I do like a hundred a day.

These guys do like 600 a day.

We wanna tap well before the first thaw of the spring.

We actually tap trees in January, it doesn't hurt to tap early.

It's better to catch the first sap run than the last sap run.

- 'Cause this is the first run.

Usually by now we've made syrup (hammering) - If you think of the tree as your home, you have a little spout, which would be the driveway, and then from the spout you have a drop, that would be like your street, from the drop that goes to your road, which is the lateral, from your lateral, it goes to the main line, which is like a highway, and then from the main line it goes to a wet dry line, which is like a super highway.

So that little droplet of sap travels all down, I think we have 35 miles of tubing in all the land that we manage and that little droplet goes all the way down and gets collected in the tank and that's where the vacuum and the sap part ways.

That sap is then pumped to larger collection tanks.

We'll collect sap with a tanker, then we'll haul that sap to our facility here in Jefferson.

They pump the sap through a flow meter, so we know how much sap we've collected.

From there, it'll go into large collection tanks.

So I think we have 30,000 gallons of sap storage at this facility.

And we will process that sap into two things, so raw sap go into a reverse osmosis, pure water is our rejected product and all of the sugar that doesn't make it through the filter that becomes the concentrated sap that we boil.

So the boiling process is where the flavor's made.

That is the most exciting part, and we're making caramel.

So maple sugar is about caramel and people will talk about the different flavors and it's this simple: the lighter the maple syrup color, the more delicate the maple flavor.

The darker the maple syrup color, the stronger the maple flavor.

But in essence, we're selling caramelized maple sugar and it's all preference.

The skill of the farmer, the type of equipment, the soil your trees are in, the type of weather you have, will all basically make an impact on the flavor of syrup you will make in any given year.

I wanna have that experience with my family, that's why I do this.

And it brings everybody together for a common goal.

This is hard, this is not an easy thing, and I'm talking about the maple syrup business, but when you do it with family, and you do it as a team, and you're trying to accomplish a common goal.

That's really rewarding.

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