Food and Drink

Want to go big with birch syrup? New technology makes it a lot easier

Interested in making birch syrup, but tired of lugging hundreds of gallons of sap from the woods only to tediously watch it boil for hours in order to get a few pints of syrup?

For birch syrup makers looking to scale up production, help is on the way.

For the last year, Steve Caccamo, owner of Next Generation Maple Products, a New York-based machinist who sells syrup-making equipment, has made his way around Alaska selling hobby-scale evaporators.

One of those products includes a small-scale reverse osmosis machine. The machine, which fits on a standard-size dolly, concentrates the sugar in the sap. The amount of sugar in birch sap is low and it can take huge amounts of energy and time to cook it into syrup. But with the concentrated sugars, syrup producers are able to easily cook the sap down into syrup with far less energy and time.

This advance in technology could kick-start a new era for birch syrup in Alaska, said Jan Dawe, director of OneTree Alaska, an outreach program of the University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Natural Resources and Extension. In recent years the program has started to research small-scale birch syrup production techniques.

"Whenever there is an economic downturn, (people) turn toward harvesting products and use it to supplement household income," Dawe said in a March interview.

And with more people interested in local foods, birch syrup makes sense. Alaska is covered in birch trees. Syrup could be the start of a broader industry, Caccamo said, as other products like birch sap drinks gain popularity.

ADVERTISEMENT

"(Syrup) is obviously the catalyst," he said. "But to me, it's the whole idea of having a resource that is right at your fingertips that could be a huge industry."

In the 1990s there were about eight birch syrup commercial producers, according to Dawe. Of those, only Kahiltna Birchworks is still going today.

It takes about 60 gallons of maple sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. For birch, it's 100 gallons of sap for every gallon of syrup.

That can make it hard for small-scale producers to get into the birch business, Caccamo said. The only way to make it economically viable is by concentrating the sugars down so it takes less energy to evaporate water in the sap.

Caccamo's reverse osmosis machine retails for about $1,500. It's spendy, he admitted in an interview last month, but said a small producer could invest in the machine plus an evaporator that cooks the syrup for $3,000.

"With this stuff it makes it feasible for people who want to get involved in it," Caccamo said. "They have some options, they can start small and in a short period of time pay it off."

Michael East, one of the co-owners of Kahiltna Birchworks, also sells reverse osmosis machines from another company. His retail at about $5,000 to $7,000 each.

He said that the Next Generation hobby reverse osmosis machines are good for people who want to step up their birch syrup production.

"To do birch syrup production is quite the leap, and to do it commercially, it's so hard to pull off," East said in an interview last month. "It'd be the way to do it with small pieces of equipment, people could do it as a start."

Dawe's organization has been trying to do that. The nonprofit has spent the last two years working on birch syrup by essentially creating a research lab for small-scale production at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

She said the syrup they've refined is lighter, with a distinct raspberry flavor. It could be a suitable syrup for pancakes, she said. Birch syrup typically has a rich flavor that's better suited for savory dishes.

"It's just been treated very gently and lovingly," she said. "It's partly how it's been treated as we've been processing it."

Dawe said about 45 families participated in a newly formed cooperative this year. That cooperative is still in its infancy — it doesn't even have a name yet — but Dawe said those families contributed 4,500 gallons of sap this season. Each family will get a portion of the syrup produced.

She said many of those families are just starting to get into birch sap and are considering getting into production in the future. Others want the syrup so they can make their own value-added products, like candy. 

"(The co-op) gives people a chance to try it and see what they think," she said.

Kathy Lake, owner of Windy Creek Herbs in Healy, bought a reverse osmosis machine this year. She went from tapping 20 trees last year and making 1.8 gallons of syrup, to 35 trees this year and doubling her production to over 4 gallons.

She wrote in an email that she first heard about the new machine at a birch syrup conference in February. Before, she would have to freeze sap in order to keep it from going bad before she had a chance to boil it into syrup. This year she was able to finish production by the time the sap stopped running in early May.

ADVERTISEMENT

"If it wasn't for the innovations (at the conference), I would still be slaving over boiling pans of birch sap," she wrote in an email last week.

Lake will be selling her syrup at farmers markets throughout the summer.

Suzanna Caldwell

Suzanna Caldwell is a former reporter for Alaska Dispatch News and Alaska Dispatch. She left the ADN in 2017.

ADVERTISEMENT