Montana’s ‘Maple Man’ Taps 300-Plus Trees To Make Maple Syrup In His Driveway

MISSOULA, Mont. — Pulling up to a house in a local residential neighborhood on a recent Thursday afternoon, David Knudson let out a loud “whoa” when he saw the bright blue bag hanging on one of the Norway maple trees in the front yard.

The 5-gallon bag was nearly half full with translucent maple sap, an impressive amount considering Knudson tapped the tree the day before. He didn’t come by specifically to collect sap, but since there’s so much, he does anyway.

“Boy, I nailed it, figuring out the perfect time to tap,” Knudson said.

The final week of February brought high temperatures in the 40s and 50s to western Montana, and the start of a busy season for the state’s only commercially licensed maple syrup producer.

Knudson will log 18-hour workdays over a six-week stretch tapping maple trees, collecting the sap and then laboriously making maple syrup for his company, Montana MapleWorks.

And he does most of it in his driveway while tapping trees in the yards of neighbors and around the area.

“I look at it as a hobby that’s self-sustaining,” Knudson said. “I do that mostly because I want to still enjoy it, but making these connections and meeting new people is also part of it.”

At that house with the surprisingly full bag of sap, Knudson rattled off a brief biography of the homeowner before he emerged for a brief chat — about the sap flow and damage to the crown of another maple tree that will go untapped this year.

It’s these types of interactions that have made Montana MapleWorks more than a business for Knudson.

Even in the midst of his busiest time of the year, Knudson will conduct maple tapping workshops to get other people in the community engaged and maybe even inspired. 

“I would love for other people to make syrup,” he said. “I don’t see it as competition.”

‘Maple Man’

While he may be the de facto expert around town, earning him nicknames like “Maple Man” and “The Maple Syrup Guy,” Knudson is still discovering important lessons and new information to refine all phases of his process, from tapping trees to bottling syrup. 

There will be days this year when Knudson and his assistants collect as much as 100 gallons of sap.

While each sap variety has a different sugar content, that quantity of silver maple syrup could yield about 420 ounces of syrup that he sells for $3 per ounce. Knudson mostly sells his syrups in-person, though interested buyers can also see his selection and contact him online at www.montanamapleworks.com.

On average, Knudson estimated that each tree he taps yields about 32 ounces of finished syrup. 

Knudson is as much in selling the idea of tapping as he is in the business of selling syrup.

He has permission from more than 100 homeowners to tap trees on their properties, which means he had to sell these Missoulians on the idea in the first place and assure them that tapping won’t hurt their maples.

It’s rare, Knudson said, that homeowners turn him down when he asks to tap their trees. 

“I think that’s unique, a little bit, to Missoula,” he said. “I find common ground on maple trees.”

Clashes With City Officials

Knudson has had far less luck finding common ground with Missoula city officials. 

In 2020, while dealing with the city’s forestry division about a downed tree on his property, Knudson learned that a cease-and-desist letter was headed his way for unknowingly tapping maple trees on city property.

Learning the intricacies of producing maple syrup has, perhaps surprisingly, been a way to learn about the intricacies of centuries-old property lines. 

Even trees set back some 10 feet from the sidewalk on the front lawn of a home in certain neighborhoods may not technically be on the homeowner’s land. And if most of a tree stands on city property, Knudson can’t tap it — a lesson he learned the hard way.

After that cease-and-desist letter, Knudson unsuccessfully tried to talk a former mayor into letting him tap trees on city property (“he was so unimpressed”), while other city officials have likewise rebuffed his offers to donate a tree for each city-owned tree he taps and serve as the city’s ambassador of trees.

Before running afoul of city officials, Knudson had tapped 250 trees in the greater Missoula area in 2019.

Some trees had to be scrapped from his tapping list, while Knudson had to knock on a lot more doors to ask about tapping others.

These days, he pulls up the OnX app on his phone to confirm a maple tree is fair game and assesses its canopy and overall health before commencing the blink-and-you-might-miss-it process of tapping the tree.

Once deciding where on the tree to tap — he prefers the north side of the tree to keep the sap out of the sun — he drills a hole, inserts a short metal tap into that hole and then hangs a bag from the tap. 

He’s managed to more than replace those trees rendered untappable by the city, and this year plans to tap about 320 trees of seven varieties. 

“I’m not the kind of person to be told no,” Knudson said. “I’m pretty gung-ho and pretty ambitious and I’ll figure out a way.”

Tapping Into Politics

Part of figuring out a way saw Knudson embark on a project a few years ago to walk nearly every street in Missoula, documenting each maple tree he found along the way. 

Even if he didn’t set out with this purpose in mind, that street walking gave Knudson valuable perspectives as he prepares for his first foray into politics.

Knudson plans to run for a seat on the city council this spring.

Despite some of his past clashes with the city, Knudson is excited by the prospect of bringing a different perspective to the city council as an agriculturalist who has created a modern business with ancient roots.

“Every time that somebody has an issue with me, it presents an opportunity for me to educate them and to change my ways, to question what I'm doing,” he said. “And that’s all good, we should all be doing that.”

But before he can make good on his run for public office, there’s a lot of maple syrup making in Knudson’s future.

An Urban Idea 

The idea of making maple syrup first struck Knudson a decade ago while admiring a tree in his yard.

He had previously worked at an organic farm and a creamery and tried unsuccessfully to grow table grapes, so dabbling with syrup wasn’t such a stretch for him.

In 2016, he tapped three trees and learned how to make maple syrup. By 2019, he was ready to sell syrup with a cottage food license from the state.

On that recent Thursday afternoon, having collected the first gallons of sap from seven maple varieties — Norway, Boxelder, Freeman’s, sugar, silver, red and autumn blaze — it’s time for Knudson to fire up one of his four evaporators for the first time this year. 

In addition to collecting all of the sap in an urban environment, all of the syrup-making happens in Knudson’s driveway and inside a converted garage at his home that’s about a five minute drive from downtown.

“This is very different than how most people make syrup,” he said of his setup.

Tinkering With Techniques

As he’s scaled the business, Knudson has acquired new equipment.

He can process up to 40 gallons of sap each hour with one of his several wood-fired maple syrup evaporators or as much as 350 gallons per hour with a reverse osmosis machine he bought for $8,000 that’s already paid for itself.

No matter the sap, the goal is the same: The sugar content needs to reach a standard density of 66.9%, a level at which it’s food safe and won’t crystallize.

Knudson will get a bit of a reprieve after he’s finished processing all of the syrup sometime in April and can hold off on bottling for several weeks, if not months.

While he previously froze the syrup, this year he plans to tinker with some new storage vessels that will help him reduce his overhead, and he’ll continue experimenting with aging some syrup in barrels that once held locally made spirits.

“I really like making things complex, sometimes overly complex,” Knudson said. “When I get into something, I try to learn as much as possible, I try to take it as seriously as possible.”

Sap Sparks Conversations

Everything Knudson has learned about maple syrup has been self-taught, but this unlikely business venture has also tapped into his conservationist side.

Trees have always held a special place for Knudson, who recalled staring at a poster from the Arbor Day Foundation that he had in his room growing up that featured trees from the various regions of the country.

“As a kid, I was always fascinated by trees, I always had this love,” he said.

Even if he didn’t intend to make a career in the syrup business, Knudson plans to stick around. That said, he’s also ventured into arboriculture and is experimenting with a different technique for making cherry juice. 

With more demand than supply, Knudson would like to continue to grow Montana MapleWorks. But to make a living full-time from syrup, Knudson would need to tap somewhere in the range of 2,000 to 4,000 trees a year.

There’s the temptation to further scale up or even move the operation out of his driveway and garage, but Knudson said he balances efficiency improvements with ensuring he still enjoys what he’s doing — and making sure he has time to talk all-things sap and syrup with others. 

“It’s a catalyst, it sparks conversation and it gets people to ask questions,” Knudson said.