Well, fellas, I'm hoping to do a weeks worth of run starting tomorrow. Gonna only tap some easy access trees, but they're big 'uns, I'll be able to put 5-6 taps on each of them. Gonna try and get 1.5 weeks worth of sap, hoping for 200-300 gallons, which will yield me close to 6 gallons of syrup. The past three years have been total CHIT here in terms of sugaring weather. This week looks promising. Wish me luck.....
Crazy crap weather but all the tubs are full right now? which will be brought up tomorrow after work. 45g plus the 35g that is still waiting in the garage. The big girl got a few hour burn tonight.
Finished up another gallon and a half last night; total of 2.5 this week since the sap started flowing good again. Think I’m getting dialed in with this evaporator. This was finished product again, just had to filter and bottle it.
I’ve got about 400’ of tubing coming down off the hill that is laying on the ground. It got 13” of snow on it, so I have some work ahead of me tomorrow. I’m assuming it is frozen and will stay that way until I get it up into the daylight. Hoping to get a good run on Sunday if the sun comes out like they expect. I might string some high tensile wire to keep the tubing up. Maybe. Feels like a lot of work for a few taps, but would tie in nicely with another set of trees that aren’t tapped this year.
I’m liking your glass bottles. We’ve always used plastic, but I’m thinking I’ll switch to glass once these are all gone.
My first batch (left sample) was very small and was finished quite heavy, and it shows. It all went into pint “house-use” jars. The second batch should have been filtered a second time (middle, see cloudy line). I did better with the third batch yesterday (right).
I needed some new filter media for this year so I purchased one of the cone style synthetic ones and a dozen liners for it. It’s been working great, absolutely nothing gets thru; including the last pint or so of syrup unfortunately.. Last time we tried squeezing the last bit thru and ended up with a pint like your second batch. Figured we’d keep that one, but I decided on dumping it into the new batch instead right at the end to just pass it thru the filter again. So this time I just dumped the last bit that didn’t want to drain out of the filter and reserved it for the next batch. I was going to get the New York versions of the bottles you have, but Amy convinced me on the glass. “You want people to be able to see the quality” - couldn’t argue with that. The price per bottle was pretty comparable to plastic, but where it gets you is the shipping. 12 case was 100# of glass.
I "volunteered" my services today to go to McLures honey and Maple in Lebanon NH next week to do a site inspection. Hopefully I'll get some goodies out of it!
My dad had a 2x6 for many years, and now I’ve got his cone filter, but my batches are too tiny to use it (every time I transfer it seems like 10% stays behind, sticking to the previous pot). I’ve been using just the inner liner, and was guilty of trying to apply a little pressure to get the “last” pint out of the filter (when only two and a half pints go in, the last pint is precious!). My current strategy is to dump the final syrup in the filter back into a pot and rewarm it, wash the liner, and filter it again. I also used dairy filter discs, but more for sap and not-quite syrup.
If there's no rush here when finishing we just pour it all in a large clear bowl and let sit in the fridge overnight.
I tied in another line that I had started working on last weekend, so now have 27 taps coming to one barrel. It is flowing very well this afternoon and tomorrow looks good, too.
