Sap flowing in ashby

[David531]

It's been running pretty good in Ashby, we bottled 3 gallons of syrup saturday. And, we had several 22 gallon collection barrels in the woods that were mostly full, we let them freeze over the last few nites at 10F and removed maybe 30% of the water as ice. Poor man's reverse osmosis, we'll run that thru the half pint tomorrow. We did that very successfully some weeks back when we had a few ZeroF nites, left us with a few barrels almost entirely frozen except the liquid core, very condensed, not enough to bother with the evaporator so we brought it straight to our propane finishing pots. It didn't flow with the wind today and yesterday, but the 10 day forecast is terrific for flow. I'm glad we went ahead and put in our taps, or most of them, about 80 taps, the little half pint cant' keep up with all the sap some days.

David

[Randav]

Does dumping the ice really work? I am new to this money pit, I mean hobby! How much do you concentrate the sap by dumping the ice? I don't have a sap hydrometer yet to check the readings my self.

[SeanD]

Yes, it does help, but be careful. If the whole bucket is frozen solid, there's frozen sugar, too, but if you have a lot of sap in your bucket or barrel and the top quarter inch to half inch is frozen, that's mostly just water.

Sean