| Nov 20, 2013


As we face shortening days, long cold, winter nights, and snow and ice, that first late winter maple run seems a long, long way off.

... Oh for that first taste of sap, cold, slightly heavy on the tongue and just a bit sweet, as it drips off the tap on that first late winter day ...

Tyler Steeves, a former Sharbot Lake High School student, remembers that taste. His parents and brothers tapped a few trees on their waterfront property on Cannon Road in Sharbot Lake a few years ago.

“We didn't live on a large property so we never did syrup in a big way, but we tapped a few trees one time a few years ago to make a bit of syrup. We ended up drinking a lot of sap right from the tree. Until then I never knew how good it was,” he said this week from his home in Ottawa.

Sap has been taken for millennia as a spring tonic, but the only market that has ever been well developed for sap is for bulk sales among maple syrup producers, where it fetches just pennies a litre.

What Tyler Steeves is trying to do is to bring sap to market as a product on its own. He founded a company called Treewell, and this past spring a crew from Treewell gathered 5,000 litres of sap from a friend's sugar bush near Ottawa and froze it in a commercial facility in Ottawa.

Before going to market, the sap is brought back to liquid form and boiled for a short time to bring its sugar content up from 2.5% to about 4% (syrup is 66% sugar content). They then add vitamin C and pasteurize the sap before lightly carbonating and bottling the final product. It is then ready for sale as what Steeves calls an elegant non-alcoholic “saperitif” to prepare a diner’s palette for a fine meal.

When they were branding and bottling the product and bringing it to market, the Treewell team decided to go upscale. They had a logo developed that is used on their labels as well as wooden coasters they have commissioned.

All of this costs money of course, and with no product to sell until the first batch is bottled, Treewell sought funding through a campaign on the Kickstarter website.

The results were better than they had hoped.

The campaign, which ends today, surpassed its $15,000 goal ($21,405 had been raised as of Tuesday afternoon from 280 backers). It also brought valuable publicity to Treewell, generating coverage in media outlets throughout Ottawa.

The Kickstarter backers were more or less pre-buying bottles of Treewell, and once 1,200 bottles go to them, there will be about 2,800 left for sale to the public. A number of those will be sold through restaurants in Ottawa and the rest at selected fine food stores. The retail price for the 750 ml bottles will be $15.

Steeves is hoping that Treewell will see “organic” growth in 2014, when he hopes to bring 30,000 bottles to market.

“The most important thing is that Treewell Saperitif is delicious, and it is made from pure maple sap which has a rich history of traditional uses,” said Steeves.

He said he hopes to find a retail location within range of his hometown of Sharbot Lake for his product sometime in 2014.

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