Michael Inniss nimbly weaves his way up and down a series of paths in the treed gully just behind his Bradner home. Much of the five acres is cleared, but Bigleaf maples dominate the second-growth forest where this maple meister got his start in syrup.

“This here is Old Faithful,” he says, patting the trunk of a particularly large Bigleaf maple with one hand and stroking his bushy black beard with the other.

Old Faithful has the distinction of being the first tree Inniss tapped back in 1978, a boyhood diversion inspired by a Sunset magazine article on maple syrup production in Washington and Oregon. Since then, he has made maple syrup some years and not others, expanding the number of trees tapped and refining his approach through trial and error. He has used as many as fifty taps in some years, but can’t estimate with any certainty how much syrup he produces. Maple syrup—not record keeping—is his forte.

The process of extracting sap from maple trees and boiling it down into syrup is known as “sugaring.” One or more holes are drilled into each tree and a small tap, or “spile,” is inserted. While other producers use plastic or metal spiles, Inniss fashions his own from small maple boughs. He collects his sap in buckets (others use networks of watertight food-grade tubing attached to jugs). One thing he learned early on was the value of rain covers in BC’s wet coastal climate.

Straight from the tree, Bigleaf sap is roughly 98 per cent water and 2 per cent sugar, with trace amounts of vitamins, minerals and amino acids. Table-ready syrup needs to be 66.5 per cent sugar—below 65 per cent, the syrup will grow mold; above 68 per cent, sugar crystals will form.

Reducing the sap down to syrup requires evaporation, which can be accomplished with anything from a pot on the stove to a commercial evaporator.

Because Inniss makes syrup in small batches, he uses a traditional method that requires minimal equipment and technology. Once the desired consistency and sugar content is reached, the boiling syrup is poured immediately into bottles, capped and turned upside down for a minute to sterilize the lids.

For more than twenty years, Inniss had no idea that others in the province were tapping Bigleaf maples too. That all changed in 2003 when a friend showed him an article about Vancouver Island’s emerging sugaring scene.

While Inniss was pondering the commercial potential of Bigleaf syrup on the mainland, Master Woodland instructor Harold Macy was wooing students at Malaspina University-College (now Vancouver Island University) with his own homemade blend. An initially skeptical Gary Backlund was among his early converts.

“I could not believe how great it was,” he recounts. “So much better than the Eastern maple syrup.” Backlund came home with four spiles, stuck three in trees, and had about 40 litres of sap—enough to make a litre of syrup—within around twenty-four hours.

Around 2002, Macy and Backlund teamed up with four others—Lawrence Lampson, Louis Lapi, Bram Lucieer and Jay Rastogi—to form the original “Island Sapsuckers.” The group borrowed an evaporator from the University of Saskatchewan and set it up on the University of British Columbia’s Oyster River Research Farm in Vancouver Island’s Comox Valley.

In 2004, Backlund and his daughter, Katherine, published Bigleaf Sugaring: Tapping the Western Maple, a how-to guide for aspiring sapsuckers. Today Backlund and his family collect about 2,000 litres of sap each year, tapping just 100 of a possible thousand trees in his 70-acre forest.

Since BC’s maple syrup industry has no official association, it is difficult to know how many people are sugaring across the province. Just thirty-two BC farmers reported tapping in the 2006 census, but Backlund puts the figure closer to 3,000 on Vancouver Island alone.

Back at his Bradner acreage, Inniss chuckles when asked what conditions he looks for to start tapping. “How much time do you have?” he replies. In his experience, sap flow is erratic and entirely unreliable—varying according to weather conditions, the age and girth of the tree, and even where it stands within the forest.

Over the years, he has developed a good sense of the conditions under which each of his trees performs best. Some produce well in Eastern-style weather conditions—a cold snap followed by sunshine—but his best yields come from what he calls “wet weather” trees. As if on cue, he arrives at a brute of a maple he calls Rain Man for its tendency to yield a high volume of sap under soggy conditions.

Although his approach is somewhat unconventional, Inniss is clearly onto something. Back inside the house, he proudly pulls out a second-place ribbon that his syrup earned at the first annual Bigleaf Maple Syrup Festival in 2008. About 1,400 people—a thousand more than anticipated—came out to the BC Forest Discovery Centre near Duncan that year, and the event continues to grow.

For small producers like Inniss, the festival offers the chance to reach a larger market beyond the usual farm-gate sales—although you never know who will come knocking at your door. This past summer, Inniss was pleased to find the Fairmont Vancouver Airport Hotel looking to purchase syrup for its autumn 100-Mile menu. “It was kind of neat,” he reflects. “Hopefully that sort of thing can continue.”

Ultimately, Inniss dreams of buying an evaporator, expanding his production capacity and setting up a sugar shack on the property. Even then, he would still make some syrup using his original stovetop process. “I actually kind of like making it that way,” he grins sheepishly.

In the end, each Bigleaf tapper is drawn to the craft for their own reasons. For Backlund, it’s the anticipation of checking his “sap line” each day and chatting around the evaporator. “It’s warm and the sap is boiling and it smells wonderful and the dogs and cats are at your feet. It’s a great time just to sit there and socialize.”

Interested in purchasing syrup from the Inniss Maplery? Contact Michael Inniss at 604-856-6902 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Sheena Starky is a Vancouver-based freelance writer/editor and author of The Casual Baker (casualbaker.blogspot.com). Her bottle of Uncle Mike’s Genuine Bigleaf Maple Syrup is under lock and key.