You’ve heard of maple syrup, but what about hickory syrup? Doug Drewes, owner of Ox Dynasty Pennsylvania Hickory Syrup, produces this sweet, niche product on his farm in Mifflintown. He found this unique path by following his curiosity about indigenous recipes and the nature around him. The rest, as they say, was written in the stars.
Read our Q&A with Drewes about his fascinating line of work and special PA-made products.
PA Eats: Can you give us an overview of what you do?
Doug Drewes: I’m sort of a hobby farmer. We actually have a team of oxen that I use to procure bark out of the woods. I started working with them prior to doing the syrup, so I kind of married my two loves together. As fate has it, we have 300 shagbark hickory trees on the farm. The way we make the syrup is from the bark, unlike maple syrup which is made from the sap of the maple tree. We collect the bark, we clean it and make sure there’s no bugs on it, we roast it over an open fire and then we boil it outside in a big copper kettle. We start the cooking with 55 gallons of water and one bushel of bark.
The bark is cooked and it makes a tea. Once we’ve boiled it for 8 – 10 hours, we remove the bark, filter the tea, bring it inside, put it in a stainless kettle, and then we cook it for another 4 – 5 hours and that’s when it reduces down to a syrup.
It’s actually a three-day process to make the product, but that’s kind of the short version of how we make it.
How do you flavor and sweeten the syrup?
We either add fruit or nuts and there is a small percentage of sugar to it, about 2% organic cane sugar. With the product itself, think in terms of making a cup of coffee. Some people drink it black, some people add sweetener or cream. I add French vanilla to my coffee because I’m a wimp. So, I love the taste of coffee, but I don’t like it just straight-up, on the bitter side. I want to soften it and make it more pleasurable. It’s the same with making the tea.
It can be drunk as a tea, and the Native Americans in Pennsylvania would drink tea made from the bark. They proclaimed that it was good for migraines, stiff joints and leg cramps. When we started making our syrup, I sent it to the laboratory and had it tested. I found out that it’s very high in magnesium and trace minerals. I did research on magnesium and found out that it’s often prescribed for different ailments like migraines and it helps you sleep. Our bodies are often lacking a little bit of magnesium, so there is a positive to the syrup, other than that it tastes great.
When you go on our website, you’ll see we actually have about 16 different flavors. I would’ve been glad just selling one flavor, just the original, but people were always challenging me to do something different. They’d say, “Why don’t you do bourbon syrup just like the maple people do? They take their maple syrup and they age it in a Jack Daniels barrel or some type of barrel and they’ll create their own bourbon syrup.” So guess what I had to do? I had to age our tea in a Jack Daniels barrel for 100 days and as the French would say, “Voilà!” Our bourbon syrup was born.
So, each flavor kind of has a backstory, except when we get to the fruit. With those flavors, it was just a matter of satisfying customers that would say, ‘Hey, why don’t you make a raspberry one? That would make a great syrup.’ So I would.
How did you get into this and learn how to do it?
I’d taken horticulture when I was out of high school and learned a lot about trees, and this is just like an extension of my learning. A history lesson about Native Americans using shagbark hickory got me inquisitive. So, just understanding the tree and its properties and the fact that we can make a syrup out of it was just totally fascinating to me.
It took me years to figure out how to do it. It wasn’t like, “Oh yeah, I’m gonna make syrup tonight.” It was a lot of trial and error. Of course, you know you can go on Facebook and see people make hickory syrup and it’s almost comical because here I am making a product that takes me three days, and I can watch some lady throw some bark in a pot, boil it for an hour, dump it in a jar, add a ton of sugar, and she says, “I’ve got hickory syrup!” It’s way more involved than what you actually see on the screen. There are probably five people in the United States that I would say are making it correctly or are going to the effort and taking much more time. It’s a little bit like whiskey, which you’ve got to let age to get it to the point where it’s the product that you want.
How did you come to work with shagbark hickories? Were they already on your property or did you have to seek them out?
When we bought the farm, they had logged it off. They had come through and taken a whole bunch of trees out. The only tree that they didn’t take was the shagbark hickory tree. During the time when we bought the farm, that didn’t mean anything to me. It was just interesting.
When I talked to some of the people that were involved with the logging, they said they were told by the sawmill operator, “Cut all the trees, but don’t bring me any of those blankety-blank shagbark hickories.” This is because the shagbark hickory tree’s bark is very shaggy looking, and when you would run that through the saw at the sawmill, it would catch and harm the blade of the saw. So the instructions were, “Cut the maples, cut the poplars, cut the locusts, but don’t bring back any of those hickory trees.” So, they left them all here.
I often say it was divine intervention that later on, when I started thinking about making the syrup based on a history lesson about the natives drinking the tea and everything, I said, “My gosh, I’ve got 300 of them on the farm.”
The tree, every year, sheds a percentage of bark. So, we could think of a tree as a snake. Every year, it sheds the skin because it grows. The trees are pushing out layer after layer after layer of bark. I actually have some trees that were cut, standing vertically out here where I cook so that people can see how loose the bark is and understand how it would just fall right off. We collect the bark that’s down. We don’t strip the tree unless somebody calls me up and says, “Hey, I just cut down a shagbark hickory. Do you want the bark?” Heck, yeah. We’ll go there with a pick up truck and we’ll strip the tree and bring it home because they’re just going to cut the tree up for firewood.
Another thing about shagbark hickory trees is that they don’t start shedding bark until they’re between 30 and 70 years old. For the first 20 to 30 years of their lives, their bark is as smooth as any bark on any tree. Then, once they hit a maturity point, they start to shag out. It’s a really interesting process.
The shagging is actually part of a defense mechanism. Imagine an armadillo. It has armor on, which protects it from getting attacked by predators and things like that. Now, think about the shagbark hickory tree. It has roughly 3 to 4 layers of bark. Closest to the center of the tree is the cambium layer. That’s what’s doing all the work and what takes the sap up and down the tree. The outer layers are the ones shagging off. When a predator comes and lands on that tree, like an ash borer beetle, it will drill to get to the center of the tree into the outer, dead layer of bark. And, under that first layer of bark is an army of ants and spiders. So, when that bore beetle comes through, it has now become somebody else’s lunch.
The bark is also a temperature regulator. If you had a T-shirt on and you walked outside today, you would get cold. If you had a T-shirt and a sweatshirt and a vest and a jacket on, it’s going to be hard for the cold to penetrate. And, if the sun’s beating on the tree, it’ll capture some of that heat underneath the bark for the tree.
There’s another cool thing about shagbarks. Shagbark hickory trees are only native to certain areas in the United States. They grow in a vein that goes from Michigan down through Ohio, Kentucky, over into Virginia and up into Pennsylvania. That’s why there’s only about five people selling hickory syrup on a commercial basis, because you have to have access to a lot of hickory trees. We literally have wagon loads of bark that is stored out in our building just waiting to be converted into syrup. And one nice thing is that, once you pick it up and store it dry, it’ll never change. Into perpetuity, it will just keep until you boil it. Then it releases all the goodies that are inside it.
What are your most popular flavors?
When we were at Christkindl Market in Mifflinburg, our number top sellers were Original, Bourbon and Blackberry. Hunters Blend is also very popular. During the months of September and October, we sold more Hunters Blend than any other flavors. Women would come to these shows and markets while their husbands were hunting and see the Hunters Blend with the deer on it, so it was connecting with that time period. Another one that sells well is Autumn Spice, which is almost like grandma’s pumpkin pie without the pumpkin. People love that with baked sweet potatoes, glazed carrots or French toast. It’s all seasonal, so certain flavors are will sell better during certain times of the year.
Our latest one that we made is Pineapple Jalapeño. It’s amazing how many people are drawn to it. It’s sweet pineapple with the heat at the back end of it for the people out there that seek out spicy things.
I would love to stop making flavors, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I’m like my own worst enemy.
We noticed that you’re a PA Preferred® member.
Everything I make is made here and I try to use all sourced ingredients from Pennsylvania. Besides the 2% organic cane sugar, the syrup is 98% extract or tea that I’m getting from the farm. I’m cooking it here, I’m bottling it here and I’m inspected by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, so I’m licensed to sell here. We became PA Preferred and I’m proud to always have that show when we go away.
Do the oxen go with you to the Farm Show?
Impossible. The two guys are like six feet from floor to hip. They weigh 3,000 pounds each and when they take a crap, it will fill a five gallon bucket. So I cannot have them with me when I’m selling syrup.
But, for the 100th anniversary of Farm Show, I had my team of oxen lead in on the opening ceremony. That was the coolest thing that I ever did. I felt like a 10-year-old that just won a ribbon at the farm show. You don’t get too many cool days as you get older, but that was one.
Ox Dynasty Pennsylvania Hickory Syrup is located at 219 Drewes Dr., Mifflintown; (717) 371-7029. You can check out its showroom Monday through Thursday and arrange for a tour of the farm with Drewes by contacting him. To order hickory syrup, head to the online store. Scroll down on the home page for numerous suggested pairings to enjoy.
- Photos: Alan L. Johnson Photography
