It’s no secret that our Pappy Van Winkle Bourbon Barrel-Aged Pure Maple Syrup is one of our best selling items. While we may have industry awards and thousands of customer reviews to prove it’s well-earned popularity, we thought we’d take a moment to explain what exactly makes our maple syrup so darn special.

For those who haven’t had the chance to enjoy our maple syrup, we highly encourage you to pause reading this blog post and hop on over to our product page and order your bottle today. But if you still need a few more reasons to better understand why this isn’t your average Aunt Jemima, here are a some things you should know:

The Source of the Barrels:

We use authentic Pappy Van Winkle bourbon barrels. We work to align the timing of when the distillery dumps the bourbon from the barrels to when our maple farmers pickup the barrels to ensure that the maximum amount of remnant bourbon remains in the barrels for the aging process.

The Age of the Barrels:

Our syrup is aged in 10-23 year old barrels, which develops the depth of flavor. Our syrup takes on special characteristics of our older aged wheated bourbon, making it so unique. 

The Farmers:

We partner with Bissell Maple Farm located in Jefferson, Ohio. Bissell has been making maple syrup for more than 100 years and is run by seventh generation maple farmers. Nate Bissell personally collects the barrels himself and oversees the entire aging and production process to ensure consistent quality and flavor in every bottle Pappy & Company sells. 

The Formula:

We use two different maple saps which makes our maple syrup selection unique. We use a blend of tree sap from Red Maple and Sugar Maple. This flavor profile matters because it adds a certain complexity and depth to the flavor as well as hints of caramel unlike any other maple syrup out there. We also use 100% pure maple syrup. There is no high fructose corn syrup, maple “flavor” or other additives in our maple syrup. The unique bourbon flavor comes from the barrels and nothing else.

Tradition Meets Technology:

The sap is collected from the maple trees in the spring, using galvanized buckets. This is a manual process aging back to the very early years of maple collecting (ie: tradition). The buckets are then dumped into tanks and pumped into the sugarhouse where a Reverse Osmosis (RO) Machine extracts the water from the sap which increases the sugar concentration (ie: technology at its finest). From there it is evaporated and what remains is the highest quality concentration of pure maple syrup ready for barrel-aging.

The Barrel-Aging Period:

We triple barrel-age our maple syrup. This means it takes three barrels to make a single barrel of maple syrup to capture the oak flavor unique to our maple syrup. We don't use additives or flavoring, we just use time to develop that delicious oak flavor. Like our great grandfather Pappy, we believe in using the highest quality ingredients and highest quality processes to produce the highest quality products. 

The Quality:

Our partners at Bissell Farms have quality certifications few in the maple industry can claim. These include the Kosher Certification from Ohio-K and a third party food safety audit from Merieux.By having our maple syrup Kosher certified and audited, we believe it is a testament to our willingness to undergo rigorous inspections to produce maple syrup at the highest caliber. 

The Accolades and Awards:

Year over year our maple syrup continues to be one of our top three selling products. In 2020 we were the winners of the Good Food Awards. Among 2,000 applicants we were honored with this award for our maple syrup, recognizing “taste-making crafters at the vanguard of deliciousness and social and environmental excellence.”

Nothing speaks louder than the words of our customers, who continue to rave about our maple syrup. With consistently high marks, 5 stars and accolades such as “Best on the planet. This is the best maple syrup, out of the world flavor, doesn’t get any better than this. Pappy would be proud.” 

We’ve also had the good fortune to be featured by celebrity chefs such as Tyler Florence claiming “that beautiful caramel aroma of perfectly aged bourbon, and so incredibly smooth, meets organic maple syrup. Boom, this is next level stuff!”

And it gets even better…

We recently released our 23-Year Pappy Van Winkle Bourbon Barrel-Aged Pure Maple Syrup. It uses the same formula as our original maple syrup but is aged in Pappy Van Winkle 23-Year bourbon barrels, the rarest barrels available from Old Rip Van Winkle. This is a very special release that will only be available for a limited time, so if you are a fan of our best selling barrel agenda maple syrup, be sure to reserve your bottle of this very special maple syrup while supplies last!

Looking for ideas on how to best enjoy our maple syrup for cooking, baking and cocktail making? Be sure to check out our recipe here.