PA Preferred® has made great strides in elevating the Pennsylvania maple syrup industry, a thriving agricultural sector of nearly 300 farms producing maple syrup and other maple goods. The Keystone State stands tall in the national maple scene, ranking sixth for maple syrup production, with plenty of room to grow. When you purchase maple syrup and other maple products from PA Preferred producers, you can trust that those goods were made with 75 percent or more of the ingredients coming from a PA farm.
We spoke with Jonathan Geyer, Executive Director of the PA Department of Agriculture’s Pennsylvania Hardwoods Council and with Kyle Dewees, owner of PA Preferred Whiskey Hollow Maple in Bradford County and President of the Pennsylvania Maple Syrup Producers Council. They shared details about this nutritious and tasty sweetener, and offered insight into the PA maple industry’s status and direction.
PA Maple By the Numbers
Pennsylvania is a major player in the maple world. While Canada, Vermont and New York might be more well-known for producing maple syrup, you need to look no further than the Keystone State for high volumes of this golden elixir. PA maple farms produce over 200,000 gallons of maple syrup every year, available in all corners of the Commonwealth.
Bottling syrup at Whiskey Hollow Maple
What’s more, Pennsylvania has tons of room to grow. Geyer says, “Based on USDA statistics on how many maple trees we have versus how many of those trees are tapped, Pennsylvania is significantly under-tapped. Meaning, we could be producing a whole lot more syrup, based on our maple resources. Vermont is the number one producer, but we have far more maple trees than they have. Pennsylvania ranks in the top three for maple trees in the state, while we’re typically fifth or sixth, annually, for maple syrup production.”
Let’s take a look at how Pennsylvania stacks up:
- PA the sixth-biggest maple syrup producer after Vermont, New York, Maine, Wisconsin and Michigan.
- There are nearly 300 PA maple farms selling syrup, and more than 790,000 trees tapped.
- PA maple farms produce about 205,000 gallons of syrup annually, valued at over $7.5 million.
- PA has six primary regions of maple syrup production, each with its own association: Northwest, Potter-Tioga, Endless Mountains, Northeast, Somerset and River Valleys.
To find maple producers and products near you, check out the Pennsylvania Maple Syrup Producers Dashboard, which allows you to search by county or product, and notes which farms are PA Preferred with the signature yellow checkmark logo.
Producing Maple Syrup in PA
To make maple syrup, one must tap a maple tree. Sugar maples are the most commonly tapped, in addition to red maples. Tapping a tree, in its simplest terms, means drilling a hole into the tree (about 2-inches deep) and inserting a spile, or spigot, into that hole. Then attaching a bucket or other vessel to collect the sap that will flow out of that spile. It takes approximately 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup, made by boiling down the sap to concentrate the sugars.
Tapping a tree at Whiskey Hollow Maple
The sugar content of the sap varies, often depending on the structures of the trees themselves. Dewees says, “The more leaves that a tree has on it, the higher the sugar content will be. There are people that make syrup with trees in their yards that are out in the open, by themselves. If you stand back and look at them, the top of the tree almost looks like a great big bush because it has so many branches on it. Those kinds of trees tend to have a really high sugar content, whereas trees that grow in the woods grow naturally, where it’s crowded. A tree in the woods is like a log that might go up 40-50 feet before there’s a top. There’s not nearly as many branches on it, so there’s not as many leaves. If you do some thinning in the woods, which I’ve tried to do, to give the good trees more room, they’ll grow more branches and more leaves over time, which will then increase your sugar content. It’s not going to happen from this year to next year. It’s more of a long-term process.”
Sustainable thinning of the forest at Whiskey Hollow Maple
On a commercial scale, a maple farm will have hundreds or thousands of taps. Whiskey Hollow, for example, has nearly 5,300 taps and aims to produce 2,000 gallons of maple syrup every year.
The tapping season, itself, is relatively short. Maple trees only produce sap when the temperatures are below freezing at night and above freezing during the day. In Pennsylvania, that window is anywhere between late January through early April, and changes every year.
The official PA “maple tapping season” kicks off with an annual festival and tapping ceremony. Dewees says, “We put it out to the public, to whoever wants to come. It moves around the state. We pick a sugar house and someone that wants to host it and can accommodate the amount of people that show up. Normally, Secretary Russell Redding from the PA Dept of Agriculture gives a nice talk while he’s there, and we tap a tree to symbolize the unofficial start of sugaring season here in Pennsylvania.”
PA Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding kicks off tapping season in Somerset County
You can also attend various tasting and tour events throughout Pennsylvania in March, and get up close with the taps, the sugar shacks and the maple products.
For those interested in producing maple syrup, Dewees says the community is very welcoming. As a first step into their maple venture, he and his wife, Sara, took sugar house tours and felt an immediate outpouring of support. “What we’ve found, for the most part, in the maple industry, everybody is really willing to teach you if you’re willing to learn,” he says. “Once producers realized we were interested in how to make it, they took us to everything we wanted to see and tried to teach us everything they could. And, even though I feel like we’re still just getting started and we’re a young operation, we’ve had people come to us that are trying to get started. So, we always try to teach everybody, too, just the way others did for us.”
The sugar house at Whiskey Hollow Maple
One challenge for beginning producers is getting and maintaining equipment. Dewees says, “Equipment can be quite expensive. It’s also not quite as available here in PA. A lot of the maple companies are based out of northern Vermont, so that’s where their warehouses and things are. Unfortunately, we only have a six- to eight-week season, so if we need a part for a piece of equipment, we need it right now. Sometimes people here will hop in a vehicle and drive all the way to Vermont just to pick a part up, turn around and come right back again.”
Dewees has been impressed by the technological advances available to maple producers. “I would say technology has come an awfully long way in the maple industry,” he says. “For big enough operations that want to spend the money on it, there’s a lot of automated equipment now that you can run with your phone.”
Putting PA Maple on the Map
As PA Preferred members, the Dewees proudly display the checkmark logo on their Whiskey Hollow Maple signs at farmers markets and special events. “It’s been good for us being able to tell the public and anyone who is looking for Pennsylvania products, ‘We are PA Preferred,’” he says.
But Dewees sees broader, farther reaching benefits to PA Preferred’s support of PA maple. He says, “PA Preferred has helped with a lot of marketing of Pennsylvania maple syrup. We, as the Pennsylvania Maple Syrup Producers Council, teamed up with the Hardwoods Development Council and acquired Acer grant funding for some marketing. PA Preferred has joined and helped us a lot. They’ve supported us with a landing page and spent money on things like coasters, table toppers and advertising. They have also bought quite a lot of Pennsylvania syrup from all over the state and given it to restaurants to encourage them to use more PA syrup. They do a PA Preferred Banquet at the PA Farm Show and invite us every year, where we can give out samples and connect with a lot of different businesses. They’ve done an awful lot to help put Pennsylvania maple on the map.”
The USDA Acer grant that Dewees mentions has enabled a successful promotional campaign for PA maple syrup that launched in October, when maple products are consumed the most, according to research, and concluded after the PA Farm Show, where PA maple really shines. Geyer says that Farm Show is the “number-one direct-to-consumer sales of Pennsylvania maple syrup within the state.”
Geyer hopes to build on the success of the campaign’s first year as they head into year-two this fall. From October 2024 to January 2025, they saw over 15 million impressions with a viewership rate that’s double the industry standard. He says, “Our year-one phase report comes out in the next month or so, and we’ll continue to work with the team to tweak and adapt to ensure that phase two, which will start this upcoming October, is better tailored to increase overall views and purchases.”
Enjoying PA Maple Syrup
Nearly any PA maple farmer will tell you that maple syrup is not just for pancakes. As a natural sweetener, this breakfast staple can take on many other culinary forms, elevating anything from cheesecake to bacon. Expanding the maple palette is important to the PA Maple Syrup Producers Council and a primary goal of the Pennsylvania Maple campaign.
Geyer says, “We want folks to understand that maple’s not just for breakfast. It’s traditionally associated with your pancakes, but it has endless culinary possibilities. It’s a one-to-one substitute for your traditional table sugar or cane sugar, so you can use it in nearly everything. We also found, through the research, that people are more interested in consuming foods that have health benefits, and maple is one of those. There are anti-inflammatory properties and it has a low glycemic index, so it’s better for folks with diabetes to utilize a maple sweetener or even a honey sweetener, for that matter, compared to your regular table sugar.”
Dewees adds, “At one point in time, it was the world’s sweetener, so it can be used for an awful lot of stuff.”
Stuff like cocktails and lattes, salad dressing, roasted pork tenderloin, and salted maple pie, for example. Dewees says, “I actually put syrup on cooked vegetables sometimes, especially cooked carrots. It’s really good. Some people make barbecue sauces with maple syrup. I’ve used hot sauce and mixed syrup with it and put it on chicken wings as a sweet-hot sauce. We make a hot pepper syrup that many customers have told me they put on bacon.”
Some of our favorite maple recipes at PA Eats include a PA chestnut and Brussels sprouts salad with maple vinaigrette, vegan, gluten-free maple-tahini cereal treats, corn, cheddar and chive waffles with tomato-maple syrup and Pennsylvania maple cider bread with salted maple butter.
Pennsylvania maple cider bread with salted maple butter
To enjoy some amazing PA maple syrup and maple products yourself, find your local PA Preferred maple producers with the PA Preferred locator tool or on the Pennsylvania Maple producers map. You can also mark your calendar for the annual PA Maple Festival, which takes place over two weekends in April (April 5-6 and 9-13 in 2025). To try Whiskey Hollow Maple and learn more about Kyle Dewees’ work, visit its website.
This series was created in collaboration with PA Preferred.
PA Preferred® is Pennsylvania’s statewide branding program that promotes locally grown and processed food and other agricultural products.
- Feature photo: Whiskey Hollow Maple
- Secretary Redding photo: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for PA Department of Agriculture
- PA Maple photos: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for PA Maple
- Maple cider bread photo: Dish Works for PA Eats
- All other photos: Whiskey Hollow Maple
