Vermont Maple & Smoke

We are a small batch producer of BBQ and other sauces featuring Vermont maple syrup in combination with different spices and local produce.

In 2016 my wife and I took a month long honeymoon in India, which was an amazing and bonding experience for us both. After returning home in mid April I wanted to have some time for sage reflection, so I went camping for a few days on the banks of the Waterbury Reservoir near Stowe VT. While basking in some early spring weather I did something I had read about in some wild foraging books, and I cut a small notch in a birch tree and inserted a small strip of bark. Low and behold drips of sap water began to spill out, about once a second. I was thrilled, and collected the dripping sap in a metal cup. After a few hours I only had about a cup of liquid, but I reduced it on the coals of my fire until it what I was left with was a lightly sweet drink tasting of marshmallows and birch beer. The whole process seemed so perfectly in harmony with that very natural of places, and I was excited by the prospects of tapping maple and birch in the future, and with the memories of spices of India still ringing in my head I pondered what possibilities where flowing through the trunks of those trees in that cold forest.

From then on year after year I tapped a small grove a trees, each year getting more and more syrup boiling sap and fogging up the windows of our home. I would spend snowy winters days applying that syrup to different sauce preparations, searching for recipes we would some day try and bring to the streets.