So, I have to jump back to last weekend as I start to catch up with blog posts. We pretty much get to boil sap on the weekends because it’s a whole day affair. So last weekend started like any other only we had tons of sap. Friday night we head to the woods and pump the sap from the holding tank in the sugar bush up to the tank in the car and then we begin the process of draining the 35 gallon leg tank into 5-gallon food safe buckets. From the buckets we start to feed the evaporator.
Friday night is a fairly quick boil to sweeten the pans and get ready for Saturday’s boil. we ran through approximately 40 gallons and as you can see below the place to me is next to the stack as the temperatures start to drop at night.
Friday night boils also provide some some excitement as flames shoot at the short 6’ stack as you reload and run the evaporator at full steam.
A camping style LED head lamp is key for these evening boils as you try to keep enough liquid in the syrup pan.
Last Saturday’s Boil was super exciting for us. We didn’t get started until late because we needed to do a quick run to Bascom’s for 6 extra cases of glass when we realized we were going to make more than 3 gallons of syrup this year. This is pretty much a 4-hour trip for us and put us home around noon.
After loading the fire box full of wood and getting a nice raging fire going we churned though a ton of sap. We were pre-heating sap 2-3 gallons at a time on our propane beer burner, which would allow us to keep preheated sap in the 160F plus range constantly going into our pre-heater pan on the WF Mason 2×3 Hobby Evaporator. This slight change in the process ended up being huge for us.
It wasn’t long before we started to get a nice syrup gradient forming in the divided syrup pan and we actually were able to do a first ever legit draw off of 219F maple syrup. I think a number of factors contributed to this first draw off but first and foremost was having enough sap on hand to boil to the point of drawing off. Second pre-heating the sap ahead of time helped prevent us from robbing the boil in the first section of the divided pan, and lastly I was running the pan lower than normal thanks to using some de-foamer, I am not sure why I never picked this stuff up before but it was great at keeping the boil/bubbles down !
Not sure how well it can be seen through the fog of maple steam below, but the gradient that developed from right to left of slightly cooked sap which is the golden color on the right all the way to the dark brown almost syrup on the left. This was one of the coolest things I saw this past weekend.
And finally when we hit temperature on the digital thermometer I would crack the draw off valve and strain the syrup off the evaporator through a couple prefilters set into a mesh strainer and into one of the wife’s cooking pots!
It was a windy day so I tried to shield the stream of syrup with the lid of the 5-gallon bucket.
From here it was into the house to cool and eventually be refrigerated until we were ready to finish the syrup and bottle later in the week. It was raining tonight (Friday) when I got home so we pushed our last boil of 100 or so gallons of sap off until tomorrow. With any luck we will make some more Dark Amber of even some Grade B which we have yet to make! As you can see form the photo below we are almost out of snow!
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