Sugaring

Season’s End

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130407 Sugar (1)Bill, Carmen and Russell gathered sap Saturday morning on what turned out to be a very nice day.  The estimate of sap was over 700 gallons.  The RO was started and the waiting began.  Russell was firing up the rig when we arrived around 3:00.

Boiling sap requires a lot of waiting and watching with moments of intensity.  Russ has a lot of new electronic gadgets that we whine about but in reality it does make boiling easier.  This year was a stack thermometer that lets you know when you need to stoke the fire.

130407 Sugar (3)At the top of the above photo is a piece of equipment that is the automatic draw.  This opens a valve on the pan that lets the syrup out into a pail when it’s the right sugar content.  A lot of testing goes on when you first begin the process.  Once you know the specific gravity of the syrup for that particular day the temperature is set. Russell tweaks it most of the afternoon always going for the best syrup possible.

130407 Sugar (4)Bill doing his job as fireman.  Poking and stoking.  We burn slabs from a local sawmill – it looks like it’s mostly pine and hemlock – don’t quote me on that though.  It is HOT in that sugarhouse once everything has been going for a while.  The stack thermometer was over 1,000 degrees a number of times.

130407 Sugar (2)Waiting and watching.  As the syrup is drawn off it is filtered and put into a holding tank.  The tank holds about 12 gallons of syrup and has a gas burner underneath it that enables us to heat it up for canning.

130407 Sugar (5)Russell is putting the fire out at the end of the boil.  There is a stainless tank in the sugarhouse with a clear hose so you can see when you are coming to the end of the sap.  You need to get that fire out and stop the process before your sap runs out or you will burn your pan.  I always feel it’s a little bit of a panic at the end, you want to boil all you can but not enough to wreck your equipment.  Tensions always begin to rise as boiling comes to an end.

As the filtering is done and the holding tank is filled we begin to put the syrup in bottles.  It’s not until you’ve canned every drop that you tally up what you did for the day.  The old record was 22 gallons in one day, Saturday we did a little over 23.  It is also some of the nicest syrup we’ve ever produced.  While Carmen and I canned Russ cleaned up.  Everything is washed down at the end of the session, it’s kind of a sticky mess but the sugar just melts away with water.  We finished everything at 8:15.

130407 Sugar (6)Any one interested?  Think pancakes, waffles and french toast, yum.  Quarts are $16, pints $10 plus shipping.  Once you’ve had this you will never go back.  We consider ourselves pure maple syrup snobs.

 

Boiling Sap

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130331 First Boil

 

I wish I could send the smell of boiling maple syrup to everyone reading this post.  It is truly my favorite part of making it.  You are engulfed in maple steam the whole time, it’s wonderful.

Easter Sunday was the first day Bill and I boiled sap with Russell.  Bill and Russ had gathered the buckets the day before and the reverse osmosis machine had done its thing while we shared an Easter dinner with family.  We lit the fire at about 3:00 and finished at 5:30 making 8 gallons of syrup.  Russ says he needs more taps now that he has the r.0.  I think he’s right.  Having so much of the water removed from the sap before we start to boil has cut the time to make syrup in half.  We talked about how boiling used to take us hours.  We’d start at 2:00 in the afternoon and maybe, just maybe be cleaning up at 1:00 in the morning.

There have been so many improvements in the equipment over the years that just make it easier than it used to be.  When we sugared years ago the men that boiled could tell when it was ready by how it flowed off of their scoops.  Now there are so many different ways of measuring the sugar content of your syrup I think the art of making syrup may be lost, now it’s manufacturing.  Well, almost.  It’s still a lot of work.

So after canning up our hot syrup and taking it away we got a call from Russell telling us he’s picking up all of the syrup we’d brought away with us – factory recall.  It was cloudy so it would have to be heated and re-filtered.  We were running blind in the filtering department with vague instructions Carmen had left behind when she went to work (she’s the expert).  So back it went and our anxious customers will have to wait another week for their dose of fresh maple syrup.

Gathering Sap – First Day of the Season

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130309 Gathering (22)

We gathered sap for the first time this past Saturday.  The day was gloriously warm – over 50 degrees.  As you can see by the muddy road spring suddenly sprung.

 

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Bill is pouring the sap gathered from the buckets on the trees into a tank behind the tractor (driving the tractor was my job).

 

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We started gathering just as the sun was going down.  I’m not sure how many taps there were where there were buckets.  Most of Russel’s sugarbush has pipeline.

 

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This gather was particularly difficult because the trees were tapped before the last snowstorm so the walking was difficult.

 

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Especially since the town had winged back the snow banks.  Does this look like fun?!?  Although Russell wearing his florescent hunting gloves gave us fodder for ridicule.  You always need something to laugh about when you’re doing something this tedious.

 

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The buckets were only about a quarter full on every tree so you didn’t really feel like you were accomplishing a lot.

 

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It was getting darker and I was wondering if we would be doing this in complete darkness before long.

 

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But as we continued to say, many hands make light work.  If we thought about how long it would have taken with two people doing it this didn’t seem that bad.

 

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The photo of the tractor doesn’t really tell you how dark it was – there should be complete darkness with the headlights showing.

The tank was probably a quarter full when we finished but Russ and Bill pumped the sap from the other storage tanks on the pipeline into the sugarhouse and it was enough to fill the rig and check for leaks.  The first boil is a little more stressful than the rest because you don’t really know what kind of issues will crop up.  The equipment is only used for maybe a month once a year, stuff happens.

Sunday was even warmer than Saturday but the sap still isn’t running strong yet.  It may be that the snow is really insulating the feet of the trees, so as the snow melts the sap will run more.  We’re looking forward to a nice long season this year.