smoky lake steam bottle/finisher - best operation

[devils11217]

For those who have used this unit in the past, how did you operate it to get the best out of it? Did you finish in it? Draw off directly into the prefilters and then finish? Dump from a draw off pail into the unit after warming it up or does no syrup in it run a chance of warping pan? I know it sounds very novice but just recieved one and would like to run it correctly to get the best use of it.

[bowhunter]

I have the small unit but I supplied my own burner. I use it to filter and bottle from. I draw off into a big pot (turkey frier pot). When I have a batch I put the pot on the burner and heat it up to finish and filter. Most of the time I have finished syrup off the evaporator so I don't need to finish only heat up and filter. I drain the hot syrup out of the pot into the steam bottler to filter. I then heat up the bottler using the steam pan and burner to 190 F and bottle the finished syrup.

Two points: 1) You can't finish syrup using the steam pan. You can't get the syrup temperature up to syrup boiling point. 2) If you use the pan to finish make sure it has syrup in it before you light the burner without the steam pan.

[Lano75]

Last year we would run the syrup thru the filters after the draw and then once we had enough to bottle we would reheat and filter one more time. Our clarity turned out great. When filtering just once we found our syrup to be a little cloudy.