Aged maple syrup gives this virgin Old-Fashioned smoky, woodsy notes

Last fall, I learned that when you fly home from the Quebecois countryside with an overstuffed bag full of maple syrup, TSA will have questions. I would have thought this to be a normal occurrence up in the Great White North, where the excellence of maple syrup is a matter of national pride, but apparently most travelers bring only one or two bottles back home — not dozens.

Fortunately my food-writer credentials were easily verifiable, so when I began treating the agents to an impromptu lesson on the finer aspects of maple syrup, I was quickly waved through. (It certainly wasn’t because they had zero desire to listen at 5 a.m. to a sleep-deprived woman talk about thrilling topics like wood density and phenolic compounds. Who wouldn’t want to kick off their day like that?)

Having made it to my gate with my precious sack of syrups — and amped up on my appreciation of the sap-based arts — I decided to crack into a tiny tin of Érablière Mont Rouge and take a few nips, before tucking it into my jacket pocket like a flask. Woodsy with vanillin, it was a different animal than my little maple leaf-shaped bottle of Cabane du Pic Bois, which was tinged with butterscotch. All maple syrups are sweet, but beneath the sugar there can be smokiness or simplicity or the kind of toasted caramel-vanilla depth you’d expect from a good bourbon.

Seriously, maple syrup is wasted on pancakes sometimes.

Like whiskey, a top-notch maple syrup has terroir, its flavors influenced by numerous factors, including the soil the trees are rooted in and the weather they endure. The syrups I slurped in Quebec have a slightly different beauty than the bottles Charles R. Eisendrath makes at Lake Charlevoix Maple Syrup in northern Michigan. “You need to have the warmth and the frost,” he told me. That tension — the trees pushed and pulled by the seasons — is what creates deep flavor.

And syrup, like bourbon, takes serious labor to make; every bottle — a miracle of weather, wood and patience. Eisendrath’s operation is made up of 1,200 taps on 800 trees, taking about 43 gallons of sap to make a single gallon of syrup. The timing matters, too: The sap tapped in late winter will be lighter in body, flavor and color than sap tapped toward the season’s end, in early spring.

Then there’s how you boil the sap. Mass producers run giant industrial evaporators, but small sugar shacks still use wood fires. “Ours is boiled with splits from the same trees in the sugarbush,” Eisendrath told me. “‘Moby-Dick’ includes a scene of whale blubber being rendered by fire fueled by oil from the same creature. So, too, with our syrup,” he said, referring to Herman Melville’s famed novel. And, much like the try-works on the whaling ship, when it’s syrup season, the boilers at Lake Charlevoix don’t stop running — vats of sap bubble over a tenderly fed fire for hours, until it evaporates into a puddle of transcendent amber goo.

And sometimes, the worlds of maple and bourbon intersect. Eisendrath ages a select portion of his syrup in 55-gallon American oak barrels that once held whiskey from a Tennessee distillery. The syrup picks up vanilla, spice and char from the wood, just like bourbon does. As a sober person who once appreciated bourbon a bit too much, I no longer miss the alcohol, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t appreciate its character. Maybe there’s nothing all that crazy about doing shots of maple syrup from a can in your coat pocket after all.

Why waste the good stuff on a plate of pancakes when you could theoretically pour it into a rocks glass, add a few dashes of bitters and make yourself a nonalcoholic Old-Fashioned?

Maple syrup can do a lot more than sweeten; it brings body, depth and a little bit of mystery. Its addition makes seltzer a treat, coffee luxurious, and cocktails — alcoholic or not — taste more intentional. “For cocktails and mocktails both, the blending of flavors is far more important than the alcohol,” Eisendrath said. And he’s right: Maple syrup plays well with many notes, including cherry and chocolate.

For this zero-proof cocktail, I break out the bourbon-barrel-aged maple syrup, because I like how it brings a smoky vanilla backbone to the drink. But any quality maple syrup will do, and each will deliver a different experience. To dilute its, well, syrupiness, I cut it with the juice of a mandarin (both clementines and tangerines can do!), first slicing off a strip of zest for that good Old-Fashioned garnish. For bitters, I like the glycerin-based orange bitters from All the Bitter, which taste bright and citrusy without the alcohol.

A nice cube of ice, a bit of water to taste, and you’ve got something that may have “old” in its name but tastes downright new. It’s the sort of treatment maple syrup has always deserved, and finally gets.

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Nonalcoholic Maple Old-Fashioned

1 clementine

3 ounces cold water

1½ ounces bourbon barrel-aged maple syrup

7 to 10 dashes nonalcoholic orange bitters, plus more as needed

1 large ice cube or 2 to 3 smaller ice cubes

Using a vegetable peeler, remove a 2-to-3-inch-long strip of the clementine peel.

Cut the clementine in half and squeeze the juice into a liquid measuring cup. You should have 1½ to 2 ounces.

In a rocks glass, combine the water, juice, maple syrup, bitters and clementine peel, and muddle. Add the ice cube, and stir to chill and dilute, about 15 seconds. Taste, and add more bitters, as desired. Serve immediately.

Total time: 5 mins

Servings: 1 (makes 1 drink)

Where to buy: Bourbon barrel-aged maple syrup, from brands such as Runamok, can be found at well-stocked supermarkets, specialty markets and online. Nonalcoholic bitters, preferably glycerin-based, from brands such as All the Bitter, can be found at select liquor stores, specialty shops and online.

Substitutions: For clementine, use other types of mandarin orange, such as tangerine; or navel, Cara Cara or blood orange. For nonalcoholic bitters, use 2 to 3 dashes conventional bitters.

Nutritional Facts, per drink | Calories: 177. Fat: 0 g, Saturated Fat: 0 g, Carbohydrates: 45 g, Sodium: 8 mg, Cholesterol: 0 mg, Protein: 0 g, Fiber: 0 g, Sugar: 40 g

— Allison Robicelli