No no..I never said you could not. I'm sorry if I came across that way in my rambling. What I meant was that u can..but how many days ? Who knows. It depends on your situation. If the weather stays cold..then sure..but nothing is running anyway. If u have a fridge..that works. Now a freezer..to me would be awesome. Cuz the water will freeze..and u can discard it. Hillbilly RO ! Your concentrating the sugar content on accident ! Now what I will tell you...is fir us..we can't freeze 350 gallons of sap. So unless we get a cold snap..we are better off processing it. We like all grades of syrup...and thats the best way to get it. The more your sap sits ...in the warm..cool..or froze...more than likely you will always get medium or dark syrup. Just how things go. But medium and dark are usually everyone's favorite anyway !! Sorry if I led you astray before. I think if your gonna save sap for awile..you need to get advice from those that can and do . I can help with the rest..I hope !
Getting bigger where we are at is fun. But it also means you have to be more on the ball..and efficient. Waiting becomes bad. So there's the bigger more expensive equipment that can help shave time off of the work..so you can have a life otherwise lol !
But then this year..we literally had no snow during our season ! But we have done the same with our 275 gal. totes. We mounded snow up on em one year..to gather and boil more another day !
45.75 gallons of syrup. All grades. Light..med..dark. first year that we got light..in 4 years. Great season. Our best ever ! We changed nothing from last year...except using the ro to 6 percent. Same 200 taps..same evap. We made 15 Gallons more this year than last.
As HoneyFuzz said, the sap freezing is a good thing. It's nature's way of RO'ing (you throw out the ice, and the liquid left behind will have that much more sugar content) I think I ended up with about a gallon and a half from the various boils I did. 40:1 seemed about right, although the second boil I did seemed way more productive than the 2% average.
Mebbe ill buy a freezer instead. A lot easier than boiling. The redneck in me wants to do it that way
The weather and trees helped us with our record year ! Some of it is our efficiency went up. In years past..if we had a gap between boils..like a week...we had to dump what was already in our pans..cuz it was gonna be sour when we started back up. So we would waste about 2-3 gallons of syrup that would have came out of that pan... that was partially on its way to being done. This year..my brother had an empty chest freezer. So if it looked like there would be a gap...he drew off 10 gallons of our sap/syrup...put it into the freezer. When we were gonna boil..he took it out of the freezer the day before to let it thaw out some..and we would start our next clean sap boil..super charged when this was added !
Question about color. Ive always bought the dark amber. Is it just the nature of the tree when you get it to 219* and whatever color it turns out to be?
Usually the first boils of our season are light...cuz the sugar content of the sap coming out of the trees is at its highest point..and the temps are cooler. So the higher the sugar content to start with..the less you have to boil it to 66 to 67 percent sugar content..and it'll be syrup. As season goes on..sugar content of sap slides down...temps go up. So you have to boil more sap..to get a gallon of finished syrup..then contend with bacteria as temps warm up. If that makes any sense as I type with my thumbs..idk ! Lol
I always thought the lighter syrup was a higher percentage of water? If you try to boil light syrup down more youll burn it? 219 is the magic number?
Here's a chart of sugar content..and what a reverse osmosis does. Kind of an eye opener on how many gallons are needed to make Syrup! Same principles if you don't RO...the sugar content of the sap changes..so does your whole operation. Good..or bad. So this year we went from using the ro to get 4 percent...and upgraded to 6 percent..as marked on the sheet. Look how much less boiling that converts to ! Less time..money..firewood..etc. And the other part of concentrating sugars...we get rid of like 60 percent of the water in the sap at the same time !
More than that....it doesn't stop our evaporator from boiling. Throw a chunk of frozen glob in..stops the boil..separates gradients ...takes forever to get back going !
Nope..same sugar content as med..or dark..just less boiling to get it there ! If it's watery...your getting "near syrup" ..instead of perfect syrup ! As far as boiling it down...I dont think that'll work..it just runs it into ball candy stage. Grade is something only the bigger guys with big RO's can kind of control. The rest of us are at the mercy of mother nature! Our situation with light syrup got better this year..because our little ro ..reduced the sugar content before boiling...greatly reduced our boiling times. But still..once it goes to medium ..we can stop it. You go with it..or go home !
The name of the game is getting rid of water . As much as u can before boiling. This was one of our biggest runs of 350 gallons. This is the RO "waste discharge..or permeate" tank. This is some of the water that I did NOT need to boil...separated from the sugar in the sap. It's an eye opener ! Either boil it...or ro it ! Or freeze it !
