A sweet vocation
Jobie Rossell fills a bucket with concentrated sap for a customer who will use it to make homemade brews. Rossell started the business to help pay for his college education at California University of Pennsylvania, where he is majoring in business.
Jobie Rossell loads an evaporator with wood before firing it up. The evaporator takes the concentrated sap and makes it into maple syrup.
Trees are tapped and syrup is drained into a tube that feeds into a bulk milk tank. When the tank gets full, sap is run through a reverse osmosis machine before it can be made into maple syrup.
Jobie Rossell’s maple syrup is available for purchase at several stores throughout the area, including the SpringHouse Country Market in North Strabane Township and Yareck’s Natural Foods in Charleroi.
Jobie Rossell, 20, runs a maple syrup business on his family's property in West Pike Run Township. He started making maple syrup in eighth grade and hopes to continue growing the company.
Jobie Rossell doesn’t waffle on anything. Ask his eighth-grade biology instructor.
“Jobie is interested in whatever you are teaching,” said Raelene Fabbri of California Area Middle School. “He asks questions about everything. It’s almost to the point you want to say: ‘Jobie, no more questions today.’
“We talked about microscopes and he wanted to go home and make his own. He wanted to put a motor on just about everything.”
One day during the 2008-09 school year, Fabbri bought an old VHS tape, “Maple Sugaring,” detailing the syrup-making process. She wanted to share it with her students.
It was a sweet concept that immediately stuck with Rossell.
“Jobie was very interested,” Fabbri said, laughing. “He decided at that time to tap his own trees and started with a few.”
He’s now up to 1,000.
In six years, the inquisitive student has transformed a middle school avocation into a part-time vocation. He has grown and nurtured Rossell’s Maple into an enterprise that is gaining a local presence, helps pay tuition and enhances a stack of pancakes.
Rossell, 20, is founder, owner, president, CEO, CFO, sales director and cleanup guy for a business he runs on his family’s property, and that of a generous neighbor, in West Pike Run Township.
Rossell’s Maple is believed to be the only maple syrup operation in Washington County.
The syrup-processing season is relatively brief, about six to 10 weeks from February to April, but Rossell produces enough to sell year-round. And he is marketing pure maple syrup, not the typical grocery store product that features corn syrup and artificial flavors and colors.
“We make 100 percent maple syrup,” he said. “It’s very simple. All we’re doing is taking water out of maple sap. No sugar is added. The only ingredient is maple sap.”
Rossell, who is licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, sells syrup from his home on South Ridge Road – look for the wooden signs out front. But bottles of his product also are on the shelves of seven or eight stores in the county, including Cox Market in Monongahela, which he said sells the most. He would like to add “15 to 20 other stores this year,” mostly in Washington County, but possibly in Allegheny and nearby Fayette as well.
Customers may purchase the sweet stuff in any of four sizes: half-pint, pint, quart and 375 milliliters.
Proceeds partly go to a worthy cause – Rossell’s education. He is a sophomore at California University of Pennsylvania, where, following a brief commute, he pursues dual majors in electrical engineering technology and business.
A businessman with a business major.
His “offices” are interesting: the woods and a 16- by 20-foot A-frame hut called “The Sugar Shack,” where Rossell produces the syrup. He does get able assistance from the family: his grandfather and father, Stanley and Stanley Jr. (Jobie is officially Stanley III); his mother, Robin; and brother Jordan, 17, a California Area junior.
Jobie did start small, tapping only four maples on the family’s three acres in 2009. “I knew we had a few trees at home. Little did I know we had a lot.”
Then the taps increased incrementally, to 40 in 2010; 150 in 2011; 300 in 2012 and 2013; 500 last year; and about 1,000 now.
The Rossells, to be sure, didn’t have that many maples. Neighbor Randy Gibbs gave Jobie permission to tap into trees on 12 of his 100 acres.
Tapping is done in January and sap lines are placed in early February. Jobie, his family and a friend from Cal, Matt Rimbey of New Castle, ran six miles tubing from the taps, mostly on Feb. 1, Super Bowl Sunday.
Unlike the Seahawks, Rossell’s Maple didn’t abandon its run game at a key time.
A vacuum pump from an old dairy farm transports sap into tanks behind the hut, with the liquid entering the wood-fired evaporator inside the structure. The evaporator, with 2.5 million BTUs, can evaporate 100 gallons of water from sap in an hour.
“It takes 40 gallons of sap from trees to make one gallon of syrup,” said Rossell, an Eagle Scout.
The evaporator cost $10,000, but it isn’t evaporating Stanley III’s savings. He said he has paid for all equipment.
The process is efficient. “The first year, we could make as much syrup as we make now in a half-hour,” Rossell said.
The process also can create a lot of smoke. “West Pike Run police stopped here because they thought it was a fire,” Rossell said.
Rossell remains true to his entrepreneurial roots, returning to the middle school about this time every year to show Fabbri and her students his craft. He made his annual visit Thursday.
“About four years ago, we made a maple sugar camp here on the edge of campus,” Fabbri said. “He taps about six to eight trees, shows higher technology by using tubing, and brings a refractometer to show differences in maple syrup.”
Rossell will likely secure a bachelor’s degree in two years and pursue a career related to one or both of his majors. That promises to be more lucrative. Still, he revels in his enterprise and plans keep it going after graduation.
“I’ll continue to to do it and continue to grow it as much as I can,” Rossell said. “But I don’t know if I can make a living from it.
“But it’s sure nice to dream.”