Creating a maple syrup culture in the Pacific Northwest But he wouldn’t have known where to begin without the knowledge, resources and help made available by the UW. in Everett, is one of the Western Washington landowners who has tapped into bigleaf maple trees as both a hobby and a way to fully utilize property his family owns near Sultan. Weiss, whose family founded and later sold Buse Timber & Sales Inc. It’s got some pretty unique flavors,” Weiss said. “It doesn’t just taste like, you know, sweet sugar. Photos above: Landowners across Western Washington are learning to collect and transform bigleaf maple sap into valuable maple syrup. Finally, the Pacific Northwest syrup is bottled and ready for the table at anywhere from $2 to $4 an ounce. Then the liquid goes into an evaporator where more reduction and caramelization take place through boiling. That’s just the beginning of the process.įrom there, the sap is sent through a reverse osmosis machine that begins to separate out the water and convert the liquid into something closer to syrup. The unrefined elixir moves through the carefully placed plumbing downhill into collection tanks. As the sap drips into the narrow tubing - it’s 3/16 of an inch - a combination of gravity and a vacuum effect helps pull the sap along and increases the yield. Tapping the tree collects about 5% of sap without causing any harm.
The thaw following a period of freezing causes sap to flow. That’s where Rich Weiss is giving syrup production a try on his family’s property.
#Big leaf maple lumber price Patch#
In the Cascade foothills off Highway 2 on the way to Stevens Pass, one patch of forest is a maze of plastic tubing running among trees. Getting pure maple syrup from a natural sap with 1% to 2% sugar content is more complex than the quaint notion of a bucket hanging from a Vermont maple’s trunk.
Department of Agriculture to assess the potential for maple syrup production in Western Washington, and see if it’s possible to build the infrastructure to create a robust marketplace. Wheiler, along with other researchers in the College of the Environment, has spent the past three years working with landowners, scientists and the U.S. Finding new ways to use the bigleaf maple helps increase the economic viability of small-forest holdings, helping owners keep their forests as forests. But as forest regulations have become more restrictive to protect native salmon habitat and water quality, bigleaf maple has flourished, especially in its preferred streamside locations known as riparian zones. The effort is a way for landowners to convert the bigleaf maple - once considered a nuisance - into a means of extracting value from their property. “We think it’s got multimillion-dollar potential,” said Kent Wheiler, associate professor and director of the Center for International Trade in Forest Products in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.
0 kommentar(er)
