What’s better than a golden waffle glazed with real maple syrup?

Adding a little bourbon to your breakfast!

Don’t worry — it doesn’t have to come in a rocks glass. (Though we won’t judge if it does.) Maple syrup producers are now giving their classic product a kick by aging it in bourbon barrels.

“I feel like we reached our potential as far as traditional maple syrup goes,” said Joseph Burkett of Old State Farms in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Mountains. “A lot of people are making it, and the market is pretty saturated.”

After two decades of making syrup the old-fashioned way, Joseph decided to give his products a twist. He bought a 15-gallon bourbon barrel from a Pittsburgh distillery and used it to store his freshly tapped syrup. He tasted it every couple of months and decided it was finished about six months in.

“At that point, it had some really interesting flavors that enhanced the maple syrup profile,” he said. “It’s like you’re layering things on top.” 

Because the liquor shares a number of flavors with pure syrup — including floral, nutty, and caramel tasting notes — the result is a rich, complex syrup that’s both familiar and unexpected at the same time.

But Joseph didn’t stop there. Once he started infusing syrup, he went a little wild, adding everything from chai tea to chipotle peppers. In the process, he created what are now some of his bestselling products.

Today, half of Old State Farm’s maple syrup — about 1,200 gallons a year — is infused, and that number is expected to grow.

And, while most syrup producers have their own “secret” recipes, Burkett is fairly transparent about his process. He usually uses two different grades of syrup, such as a rich amber and a darker syrup, both of which come from the Appalachian forests that surround his business. He heats the mix before putting it into a barrel and then stores it in a special rack. Once the syrup is done, usually in six to eight months, it’s filtered to remove any wood char and heated to 185 degrees to make it shelf stable. The syrup is then bottled, labeled, and stamped with the barrel number.

Always the innovator, Burkett is constantly pondering new flavors. “I think brandy-infused syrup would be interesting,” he said, but with demand for his unique syrups growing, he hasn’t had much time to tinker lately.

“Right now, I’m just trying to keep up.”