Buddy Sap

[derekp]

I boiled 40 gallons of crystal clear sap tonight..buds are just starting to pop....smelled slightly buddy while boiling....ended up with a gallon of horrible woody tasting syrup thats really cloudy and a wierd shade of yellow.....my 15 trees on gravity ran good for the first time this season tonight as i was boiling...too bad its over.....weather conditions are finally looking perfect...is there any use for buddy syrup??

[PerryW]

A few of my colder trees had their best run of the season over the past two days. Crystal clear, good tasting sap, but the syrup is pretty strong.

If you have only a few gallons, people will buy it for cooking syrup for a reduced price. You can let them taste some first (if you dare).

There was also some talk of boiling the buddy syrup and bringing it up to (something like) the soft-ball stage and then adding water slowly and bringing it back down to syrup. Somehow this was supposed to eliminate the buddy flavor.

[OldManMaple]

I left my pump on all week hoping the sap would clear up or flush the crap out of the lines but the sap still runs cloudy. It has lightened up a bit but some of my trees have some buds that are open like pussy willows. Just a few but on enough trees that it's not worth unplugging them. The taste wasn't bad but was there. I could keep boiling it to get my gallon number up but we made over 150 gallons of good tasting syrup and only the last 10 gallons was C. It was tough to shut the pump off as I was getting 500+ gpd off of about the 500 taps I had left in. Looks like good sugaring weather now but my trees could not take a week of 75 deg.

[derekp]

Perry..what exactly is "softball state".... Im new at this stuff and might try to see if i can salvage my last batch..i was guessing that buddy syrup would be really dark but this stuff is comparable to light a in color...but just cloudy...could the syrup not be done do to atmospheric pressure or something odd? I got it up to 219 and it seemed to happen a lot faster than usual...and it foamed a lot more..everything about it was abmormal..or is it most likely just buddy crap??