Things were firing on all cylinders yesterday with the evaporator. Will was cooking while I ran to town quick. When I got back home I saw this. Thought it was pretty cool so I took a video to share.
Draw off of syrup from last Saturday.
Still going. Red maple flower buds are swelling but sugar maple are still pretty tight. Being at 2200-2400 feet elevation is definitely helping us. I hear some producers in our area are done. It froze last night for at least 6-8 hours getting down to 29 this morning. Sap was running decent this afternoon and clearing up from the warm weather. It smells and tastes fine so we’ll see how long we can go. Making dark robust grade last boil. With the cold nights this week, we may get down to amber again or maybe we’ll stay dark don’t know. Sugar content was still 1.6 after 5 days of no freeze which is pretty good. Better than I expected. We plan to keep going until we start making very dark very strong flavored syrup then we’ll throw in the towel. A little over 400 gallons of syrup made so far. We’ll post an update later in the week.
Evaporator Cruising Along
New pans are doing awesome! Cooking a lot more sap with same amount of wood and making more syrup per hour than ever. Almost boiling to well at times sap is splashing over sides and onto outside of pan. Here is a video of the evaporator in action today. Have a great weekend!
First Syrup of the Season
First boil of the season went well. Sap ran slow but steady until this morning when the temperature dropped to freezing. Temperature really plummeted this evening. Supposed to be 10 by tomorrow morning. Maybe a little sap Wednesday but then cold until next Monday. Next weeks weather looks good for sap.
Maple season is coming to an end soon but last week we had the evaporator working like a fine tuned machine. Steam coming out everywhere. Hope to get one more decent run after it freezes tomorrow and Wednesday night then I think with the forecast that will be it. We’ll keep you posted.
3 weeks into the season and I think we finally got the evaporator air over fire and air under fire figured out. It takes the right mixture to get the most out of it. This video shows how well it’s evaporating. Any place steam can escape it is.
Sap really let loose today. Didn’t totally thaw out until after lunch after the cold Friday night through last night. Ran almost a gallon of sap per tap last 8 hours. Going to pump tank empty in a little bit and see what’s in it tomorrow morning. Here is a video of the sap coming into the releaser Friday afternoon. It only ran a few hours Friday afternoon before it froze back up but it ran pretty good when it did run.
Sap started flowing well by late morning Monday. Check out the short video. That is the new 3/16 pulling natural high vacuum. Collected 2 gallons of sap per tap since Monday. Sugar content is about 2.1% so we are close to a 40:1 sap to syrup ratio. Today and tomorrow should be good. We’ll keep you posted.
We make traditional maple products including maple syrup, candy, sugar, cream & maple caramel popcorn We are located near Ulysses which is in north central PA.
