JEFFERSON, Ohio — Nate Bissell is quickly becoming the industry’s number one syrup ruiner.

That’s the tongue in cheek way he describes his fledgling operation where he takes good syrup and pours it into old bourbon barrels and lets it sit for nine months.  

The result? A smooth, extremely flavorful syrup that tastes almost exactly like bourbon and fetches an incredible price in urban markets.  Two bucks an ounce, in some cases.

“What we’re doing here is the biggest story in the maple industry,” Bissell said last month during a tour for The Maple News of his facility, located in an abandoned, 40,000-square-foot General Electric light bulb factory an hour north of Cleveland.

The vast old factory is slowly filling up with barrels from dozens of different bourbon distillers from Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana.  And slowly aging syrup to perfection. 

Now in its fourth year, Bissell’s business is booming.  He mortgaged his home and dumped his savings into the operation, going “all in” to capitalize on an exciting new product and what he says is a rocketing market to absorb it.

He’s a sixth generation sugarmaker, with a sugarbush in nearby Rock Creek, Ohio.  But the maple is becoming secondary to the excitement he is creating for a brand new speciality product with huge potential for growth.

“I’m really passionate about this,” he said.

Bissell’s business has largely become a barrel exchange, he said. 

Once he takes in the barrels from distillers and ages his syrup in it, he sends the barrels back out to beer breweries who in turn age their beer in those same barrels to get a maple-bourboun flavored beer.  One of those breweries includes Goose Island, a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch.

“I’m in the barrel business more than the syrup business,” he says, only half jokingly.

Bissell has been taking in barrels from rum distillers too, adding a rum-aged maple to his line of products.  Much the same as bourbon, the rum flavor is captured in the syrup after aging, Bissell says.

It helps that Bissell’s background is chemistry.  

So far, he has stuck to his day job of chemist for a contracting company of General Electric.  It’s that same training and experience in chemistry that has taught him what he says are the proprietary secrets of properly aging syrup in barrels and capturing flavor.

“Having the experience I have, I know I can get the flavor out of a barrel better than anybody,” he said.

Bissell says that the flavor that comes from the aging process does not develop from the bourbon (or rum) but instead comes from the charred oak staves that make the barrels.  It’s the caramelized sugars in the oak that are soaking into the syrup, he says.

“I’m not after the bourbon, I’m after those caramelized oak sugars,” he said.

The marketplace is heating up with competition, with perhaps a dozen or more startups and sugarmakers now making the product on a commercial scale, all across the Maple Belt.  

Bissell says he doesn’t view any of them as competition.  In fact, he is not shy about sharing information and helping others along with the product.

In his mind, a completely new category of maple specialty product is opening up and the more people involved in growing it, the better.

Bissell said he is willing to sell barrels to other sugarmakers who want to try and make the product. 

“The only way to survive in this business is through value-added products,” said Leslie Ober, The Ohio State University extension maple specialist in the area, who has consulted with Bissell and also has become a huge cheerleader, touting the innovation of local Ohio sugaring.

And boy is the money there for this product.

Bissell says that the bourbon barrel aged maple product is fetching as much as $38 for a 12 oz. bottle, under a private label brand.

“That translates to $405 per gallon,” Bissell said.

He has big plans for the future.  He hopes to fill all of the square footage in his big facility and be taking in upwards of 100,000 gallons of syrup from local Ohio sugarmakers within five years.

“We plan on eating up all of the tap expansion around here,” he said.

Ober said he is happy about that and how Bissell’s enterprise will help Northeast Ohio sugarmakers overall.

“It’s keeping the syrup in Ohio,” he said.