Local couple taps into sweet success

|Landenberg Business|

All photos courtesy Kyle and Sara Dewees

Members of the Dewees Family on their land in Warren Center, Pa., where they tap their maple trees to make Whiskey Hollow Maple products. From left: son Wesley, 15; Sara Dewees; Kyle Dewees; and daughter Adley, 12.

Local couple taps into sweet success

Whiskey Hollow Maple syrup (made in Pa.!) catching on throughout region, elsewhere

By Natalie Smith Contributing Writer

If it was suggested to Kyle and Sara Dewees that they may have maple syrup running through their veins, they’d probably laugh—and then say it wasn’t too far off the mark.

The couple have been tapping maple trees and transforming the sap into their all-natural syrup since 2016. But the flavor of some Whiskey Hollow Maple products makes them so much more than something to drizzle on a stack of pancakes.

“We take pure maple syrup and age it in whiskey barrels for a year,” explained Kyle. “It gets the whiskey and other flavors from the barrel.” Working in collaboration with Manatawny Still Works

A display of Whiskey Hollow Maple syrups for an Artisan Market at Winterthur. In addition to markets, events and brick-and-mortar shops, Kyle and Sara Dewees also sell their maple syrups, candy and other wares via their website, www.whiskeyhollowmaple.com.

in Pottstown, the Deweeses said it’s been a mutually beneficial exchange. “[Manatawny] takes a couple of the barrels back and they make maple whiskey,” Sara said.

The idea of aging maple syrup in whiskey barrels was inspired by Sara’s investigation.

“When we first started looking at doing maple and getting serious about it, I started delving into reading just about anything I could get my hands on to do with maple and just looking for something a little bit different. [We didn’t want] to go the way everyone else went; your standard plastic jug and just plain syrup. I kind of wanted to go a different direction.

“I stumbled upon an article about these two guys out in the Midwest,

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they had owned a restaurant and they had tried this in their basement as an experiment. And as soon as I saw it, I couldn’t wait to tell [Kyle] and then you knew that was what we were going to do. We tried it, and it was great and just took off.

“So that’s not all of our syrup, but a big portion of our syrup is sold that way.”

The Deweeses first tried their hand at syrup making on Kyle’s family’s land in Bradford County. “My parents have property up in northern Pennsylvania,” Wesley Dewees, 15, tapped a few of his own trees Kyle said. “They had a cabin and this season. He was paid per gallon for the sap he maple trees and we kind of decided one year that we were going to try collected, his father Kyle said. It takes about 50 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. it. And it worked. We actually made syrup. And we enjoyed it.”

They initially tapped just over 80 trees, getting enough sap to convert it to about eight gallons of syrup, boiling it over an open fire. “It was enough for ourselves and our family Continued on Page 34

members,” Sara said. They later purchased their own 100-plus acre property in Warren Center, and Kyle said they’re hoping this season (which runs from about February through early spring) to tap about 5,000 trees. “During the season, I live there pretty much for a couple months,” Kyle said, noting that the rest of the year they make the eight-hour round trip every other week or so. “This time of year, it’s getting to be almost every week,” Sara said. “We have a [certified] kitchen up there. And that’s where we do all our bottling.” The tapping process involves connecting tubing to the tap, and collecting the sap in a tank. Within the tank is a pump that sends the sap to a sugar house, which holds an evaporator that boils down the sap. The temperature is monitored,

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because the sugar amount, called brix, has to be at 66 percent to be legally considered maple syrup. “It’s basically just boiling it as ferociously as you can, caramelizing it and bringing it to syrup,” Sara said. It takes about 50 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup.

The commitment to the maple sugaring business seemed a natural for the couple.

“We’re both very outdoorsy-type people, so it really fit into what we were looking to do in life,” said Sara, who also works as a civil engineer. “I grew up on a farm. Kyle did a lot on his parents’ land; his uncle and his grandfather had a farm and so we had that background. We knew it was something we wanted to return to, we just didn’t know how it was going to manifest.”

Kyle, who also does landscaping and small excavation work, said, “I do less of all [the landscaping] all the time because the maple syrup business has taken over. But the original plan was, I’d be able to do this in the wintertime, rather than plowing snow and Sara and I could do it together. Now it’s really turned into our main business.”

As word has spread about Whiskey Hollow and the business has grown, offerings in its larder include maple syrups infused with cinnamon, vanilla, rum and hot pepper, in addition to plain. Maple candy, fruit preserves, mustards and honey are also among the goodies sold by the Deweeses.

Rooted, a New London gift shop featuring the work of small artisans, was the “first brick-and-mortar” shop to carry Whiskey Hollow Maple’s wares, Sara said. But they’ve found success selling at additional locations including the Station Taproom in Downingtown, Hank’s Place in Chadds Ford and worKS in Kennett Square. Farmer’s markets, such as the one in Bryn Mawr, are also good places to find Whiskey Hollow Maple goods.

“We got quite a few stores in the area, and also up toward the Allentown area, and out toward Lancaster. We just picked up a new one in Gettysburg. So we’re starting to grow out a little bit,” she said.

The Deweeses said there’s one thing they can count on at events where they are selling their products: “Pretty much every market, someone will ask us where in Vermont we source our syrup. They’re just flabbergasted that Pennsylvania can make syrup and that it’s good,” Sara said.

Pennsylvania actually produces quite a bit of syrup, Kyle

noted. Much of it is sold in large drums in New England. “They blend it together, and if they blend it with syrup from up there, they can call it Vermont or New Hampshire maple syrup.”

Despite having maple syrup so much a part of their lives, the Deweeses say they’re always finding new ways to use it.

“We cook with it an awful lot,” Kyle said. “You can put it on meats, you can put it on cooked vegetables, roasted vegetables, use it as a salad dressing. We put maple in coffee as a sweetener. We use maple as a sweetener in lemonade, too. And it’s good on ice cream.”

Sara added, “Kyle does a good one with maple and hot sauce for chicken wings. The sweet and the hot together, that’s really good. Once you learn how to cook with maple, it really starts to come together. You just cook low and slow and it caramelizes and just forms this nice glaze.

“We’re kind of on a mission to show people ways to use it, other than pancakes right now. We get a lot of people that come up and say, ‘oh, I don’t eat pancakes” and well, we don’t either, but we use syrup almost every day.”

During their maple syrup education of the public, the Deweeses want to emphasize that unlike some of the more popular syrups on the market, at room temperature, real maple syrup has a thinner consistency. “Probably one of our biggest pet peeves is when people come up to our stand, and they turn the bottle upside down. They go, ‘oh, that’s not thick’,” Sara said. The popular syrups are thicker because they are made with corn syrup.

“So they always want to know the difference between real maple and [the popular syrups]. But it’s hard sometimes to get people converted from what we call the ‘fake’ syrup to real syrup.

“We do have a lot of success, though, mostly with our vanilla-infused syrup. It has that kind of vanilla-y, buttery kind of flavor that people are used to [with the popular syrups]. We can get them switched over on that. And then from there it’s easy to get them to switch to just regular, plain maple syrup.”

Another difference between real maple syrup and the popular syrups? “Once a week somebody asks if we have sugar-free syrup,” Sara said, laughing. “There’s no such thing as sugar-free maple syrup. That’s what it is: sugar.”

“People ask if we add sugar to it,” said Kyle.

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The Whiskey Hollow Maple project has become one the whole family is involved in. Son Wesley, 15, and daughter Adley, 12, are old enough to appreciate how much work their parents are putting into the business.

“Wes even tapped a few of his own trees this year,” Kyle said. “He put his own taps in and hauled his own sap. We paid him per gallon for the sap that he collected.”

As expected, as the weather starts to cool, business starts picking up for Whiskey Hollow Maple.

“As soon as it turns fall, all of a sudden everybody wants to buy maple syrup,” Kyle said. “This is our crazy time, from now until Christmas it’s all shows and festivals.”

Reflecting on their growing achievements, Sara said their zeal and perseverance helped fuel their accomplishments.

“I mean we didn’t expect it to take off like it did or to have the success that we have,” she said. “We’ve had the communities kind of welcome us with open arms and it’s just been a great, great experience. It’s been a great way for our kids to learn about being small business owners and what it takes to go into these businesses. “You really have to love what you’re doing and really have a passion for it to put in the hours that you need to put in to be a small Filling bottles in preparation for a Labor Day weekend business. We’re doing it all ourfestival at Roots Country Market in Manheim, selves with the kids’ help and no Lancaster County. employees. It really takes a lot of dedication to do that.” More information about Whiskey Hollow Maple is available at www.whiskeyhollowmaple.com Natalie Smith my be contacted at natalie@DoubleSMedia. com.

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