Maple Syrup - Not Just From New England Anymore

LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 23, 2010) - A handful of states probably come to mind when maple syrup production is mentioned. Odds are Kentucky is not one of them. But in a region seeing an unprecedented, and often-detrimental increase in red maples in the wild, a University of Kentucky College of Agriculture professor sees a chance to “take lemons and make lemonade” or, in this case, syrup.

“You don’t have to have pretty trees to make maple syrup. You just need to have trees that are producing maple sap,” said Deborah Hill, professor in the UK Department of Forestry. “Given the amount of maple of one type or another that we have (in the state)… I think it has tremendous opportunity as a cottage industry.”

Lee Blythe is an owner and general manager of Federal Grove, a restaurant and bed-and-breakfast situated on land in Logan County that was originally part of a 10,000-acre land grant to Gen. Jonathan Clark for his service during the Revolutionary War. He was looking for something to add to his business, and the idea of maple syrup seemed to mesh with both his restaurant and the region’s history. 

“The Shakers had another farm right over here in the early 1800s. They called it the Sugar Maple Farm, so this historically has been sugar maple country,” he said. “We’re all about history,” Blythe chuckled. “We like food and history all wrapped together.”

Currently, Blythe is tapping approximately 50 sugar maples on the Federal Grove property and neighboring maples. He uses a tubing system that relies on gravity to direct the sap from each tap downhill to a central location where it’s collected and transported to the sugarhouse. You can view Blythe and Federal Grove’s tapping system on You Tube. To date this year, he has about 500 taps and plans to have 850 before season’s end. It typically takes 40 to 45 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. Ambient temperature, with its relationship to air pressure, is the major factor in how fast sap flows through the taps. The best sap draw requires frosty nights and days in the 30- to 50-degree range.

 “We feel like there’s quite a bit of maple resource out there,” Blythe said. “I feel like there’s a viable opportunity for some others to get into it as well.”

And though Kentucky has never been, nor probably ever will be at the forefront of maple production in this country, to the best of Hill’s knowledge somebody somewhere in the state has always been producing maple syrup on some scale. “I think probably in this state, somebody’s been making maple syrup from the time when the Native Americans were here,” she said.

Blythe, with his dream of marketing southern maple syrup throughout the South, thinks the time has come to build on that long history and put Kentucky’s name on the list of well-known maple syrup producing states.

For more information on the Federal Grove syrup production, contact Deborah Hill, 859-257-7610 or email dbhill@uky.edu.