(light music) - They grow really big.

They have the biggest everything of all the maples in the world: the biggest leaves, the biggest flowers, they grow the biggest, and its sap makes an amazing syrup.

(light music continues) - I remember climbing over piles of underbrush with my siblings, and it was a grand adventure.

We were always told, "These trees are worthless.

You can't even really use 'em for fire wood."

- [Dan] Well, it's almost magical.

(drill whirring) It's a sweet, watery substance coming out of the tree.

- I love it.

I just take a teaspoon when nobody's looking.

(laughing) (light music continues) (bright rhythmic music) - [Dan] Still frozen enough it's not too slippery.

- [Speaker] Hold onto Toby, okay?

You're in the middle, so you got to be a seat belt.

(engine whirring) - This line's not tight.

- Well, that line's not active anymore.

That's last year's line.

These are bigleaf maples.

These are native to this area.

They grow wild.

These ones were not planted.

On the sugar maples back east, they're very meticulous, because their trees grow really, really slow.

Whereas these, it's hard to find the hole from last year because they grow so fast.

- [Narrator] Maple syrup is one of the iconic flavors of the Northeast, but the Pacific Northwest has its own maples: bigleaf.

Pretty, but landowners haven't really known what to do with them.

- I moved here about 18 years ago.

I had a farm and I couldn't work the farm anymore, so I retired up here.

It was a perfect place for kids to run around.

I didn't have a vision of much else.

I had this 10 acres of maples here, and I thought, you know, I got to try to cut 'em all down or manage 'em, and that's a lot of work.

I talked to Eric Jones, and he came over and he looked at what I've got and he goes, "This is perfect."

- What we're seeing are small commercial producers emerging that are creating these handcrafted, artisanal, small-batch products.

And a lot of care goes into making 'em.

- [Narrator] West Coast maple syrup is different.

(light music) - Well, we're not looking to compete with the maple syrup industry in the east.

They've got a different product.

Their product is a pancake syrup.

Ours has more flavor, it's more robust, it's out of the Northwest.

You could put it on pancakes if you want to.

It tastes good on pancakes, but it's going to be expensive, just because it takes us a lot more handling, it's a different industry.

This is not real sweet.

This is about 1% sugar.

At 1%, it takes 100 gallons to get a gallon of syrup.

(light music) - [Narrator] Native peoples in the Northeast made syrup by freezing sap or dropping hot rocks into it to evaporate the water.

You can't make much of it the old-fashioned way.

- You drill a hole, hammer a spile in, you hang a bucket.

And then, every morning, you go through and you pick up your 500 buckets.

It's a lot of work.

- [Narrator] New plastic tubes and vacuum pumps have opened up a different way to work.

- Everything runs to a collection point.

So instead of picking up 500 buckets, you're picking up one tank full.

(laughing) That's a big deal.

A hole, like a squirrel hole?

Oh, squirrels have discovered 'em.

- [Narrator] And to turn sap into syrup, you have to remove a lot of water.

- Before we had reverse osmosis, you would have to cook the water out.

With the reverse osmosis, we can get about 80% of the water out of the sap before you cook it.

That's huge.

There's no manual.

It's a maple tree, but it's not a sugar maple.

Most of the research is in sugar maples.

We got a different climate.

We got a different tree.

Nobody's been doing it on a scale like this.

It's a very new operation.

(light music continues) - [Narrator] Maples have always been a part of Northwest forests.

- There's so much maple out there with millions and millions and millions of maple stems that most you can't even get to, you won't even tap.

You don't get that kind of density with sugar maple in the Northeast.

So we do have some unique ecological conditions in which it really could be a very productive commercial spot for people.

(hammer thumping) - When you hear it go thump, (hammer thumping) you're in deep enough.

- [Eliza] They go all through Northern California, up to British Columbia, and up to about 1,800 feet of elevation.

The Willamette Valley is full of them, and they are an amazing producer of sap.

And they're a really, really hardy tree.

- [Narrator] But Douglas firs have been more valuable as a source of lumber.

- About four years before I bought the place, they logged it.

They replanted, which is the law, but they didn't poison all the maple stumps.

With all that root system still in there, the maples pushed real fast, and they grew up and they shaded out all the fir trees.

Because that's what grew fast.

The groups of trees aren't the way they normally grow.

They grow this way because they were cut off.

- [Eric] If you were to just cut your forest and do nothing, it would likely come up in maple.

- We tap really young ones as well, and they actually give us a lot more sap sometimes than the bigger ones.

So they could be about a 10-year-old tree by the time we can tap them, so really, really young trees.

(drill whirring) - [Narrator] It takes decades to grow a tree for lumber, but sap comes every year.

- Right now, the leaves are starting to change due to lack of light.

They're just drawing back those sugars into the stem, into the stump.

It's just saying, "Hey, we're done with the season of photosynthesizing, converting the sun into sugars, into storage in the roots."

And then, here in a month or two, we'll be tapping the trees to draw that sugar out of the root structure and turn into syrup.

- [Narrator] This is not your average pancake syrup.

(upbeat country music) It's a new flavor.

And Northwest chefs and diners are exploring what it can do.

- We braise the lamb shoulder in maple sap.

So we took the fresh sap and made a stock with some lamb bones and then braised the lamb shoulder in that.

Once we reduce the sauce, the braising liquid, it just becomes like this really super sweet, savory, delicious combo.

- There is a lot of depth to this syrup.

It's got the sweetness, but there's not quite a bitterness, but there's something in it that makes you go, "That's not the same."

- Minerals in the soil are what really give pure maple syrup its complexity.

So it's not just sugar in the sap when you collect it.

It's beneficial nutrients, like potassium and calcium.

We have these very mineral-rich clays, and the trees are pulling up minerals out of that.

All that adds up to different flavor profiles.

- There's early season, which is like an amber, just a light, a sugary, a little bit of a caramely flavor.

And as the season progresses, it gets darker and darker, notes of coffee, like sweet, earthy tones, a little bit of green.

You have some woodiness, rich molasses.

You have like almost a brine.

- One visitor said, "Oh, it's the espresso of maple syrups."

(light music) - [Narrator] Syrup could be just the start of a different way to think about bigleaf maples.

- You can make all kinds of wonderful products like honey.

You can eat the spring flowers.

They taste like broccoli when they first come out, and there's lots of 'em.

(light music continues) - [Eliza] Its leaves are really useful.

You can wrap things in them.

That's an Indigenous tradition.

Really, it is the taste of the Northwest forests.

It really tastes earthy and rich.

(light music continues) - [Narrator] And for landowners like Dan, maples may point the way to a more sustainable industry for future generations.

- My why for doing this business is to create a multigenerational family business, where my children and grandchildren can use their gifts and talents.

(light music continues) It's a family business that we can all enjoy.

(light music continues)