Dill 2016-will it happen

[Dill]

So the ongoing saga of my 16 season. Sugarhouse is done. Except for power. PSNH is coming to inspect next tuesday.
Today was get the woods tank in the woods and start running mainline.
I want to give a shout out to Jeff Moore of Windswept Maples. I hired Jeff to layout our mainline setup back in the fall. Then after the brief run Jeff and Brad came down and strung wire. I can't believe how much those 2 got done in a day. If you need maple services call these 2. I thought the price was well worth it.

Anyway today was fight with the dozer for longer then expected but it finally got going at noon. Got the tank out. And got the first 2000ft of pump line to the tank. Tomorrow is 2kft of vac line and maybe 2200 of wet/dry
If it wasn't for the last minute I wouldn't get anything done.
OH ya no evap still. Come on Cabin by the Creek its getting late!
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[maplestudent]

Sounds like you've been a busy guy. Wishing you good luck on getting your evaporator soon.

[Dill]

Well it was a busy weekend. We got 4.5k ft of 1in up and tensioned by sunday afternoon. Got 3k ft of 3/4 unrolled today. Have to say those little 500ft rolls are much easier to drag. Looks like I over bought 1in and undergrabbed 3/4. PSNH is coming out tomorrow to hopefully sign off for wire run to the shack (granted the rest of the family is calling it the sugar mansion). Feels good to actually be getting close on having our woods up and running. Tomorrow afternoon is tension and tie 3/4 in to the wet/dry system. Then it looks like wensday/thursday is out for weather. So we will be building a slider door and getting the pulleys up for the copula system.
Pretty amazing how fast the snow disappeared in 2 days. The upside of running lines along a stream is you know its going down hill. The downside is suddenly the ice is gone and water is cold.
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[Russell Lampron]

It's good to see that you are making progress. Hope you get your evaporator soon.

[Dill]

I have to say I don't think I will boil this season. The evaporator still hasn't shown and now its not even complete. Maybe it will show up this weekend at this point is if going to be worth tapping for a week of the end of the season run.

[Russell Lampron]

I would tap so I could play with my new toy. That is if it shows up and you can realistically get it set up before the sap stops flowing.

[MapleSaint]

Hey dill seems like you got a lot going on over on the other side of town. Just think how sweet it is going to be when all the hard work is done. Met one of the family members the other day and he said the sugarhouse(mansion) was awesome. Going to try and stop by and check it out someday. good luck and hope your rig shows up.

[Dill]

My father or brother? Usually they both tap and haul sap to Josh but my brother isn't tapping this year. He's buying a farm up in VT and figures he's not going to be able to move NH syrup in VT.
Were in town are you? I've seen a few trucks and tanks moving around town the last couple days.
I ordered up another 3k ft of 3/4 mainline yesterday. Hoss at Webb in Rutland is the man if you need to order any. 17cents a ft cheaper than concord quoted me. Also the people who own the 150 acres across the street from me told me to go ahead and tap anything over there. I've got to finished up my property first but its great knowing there is more right there.

[MapleSaint]

I met mark over at the Durham farm. He said your (shack) is preety sweet. I live right out side center of town. That's nice you have more taps to look forward to. If you need to push a couple hundred down my way next year let me know. I like to step into a 2x6 min soon so I will need to find a little bush to tap. I will stop buy and check out what you got going nh on. Maybe learn some tricks.

[Dill]

Time to call it like it is. No contact with Cabin by the Creek straight to voicemail since wensday. I don't think its going to show up and I'm asking for a refund. Not happy, I would like to support a start up business but I don't know what happened.
So on that vein I started tapping my Northwood bush to haul to Josh. Got about 200 taps out in 3 hours. Seems like most of that time was trying to figure out which way the 30 tap down lines ran. Getting better each year at that. Its a cold bush and was barely running this afternoon. Got to finish that in the morning and start on vac issues.

[Russell Lampron]

Sorry to hear the bad news. I hope everything works out alright for you. I was hoping you would get the new evaporator and have a chance to boil in it this year.

[Dill]

Just emailed NHMPA and asked to be removed from the Maple Weekend listing. Can't explain how pissed off I am at Cabin by Creek / Creekside Maple DO NOT ORDER FROM David Yochim hopefully that sticks in google, looks like we will miss the whole season thanks to this joker. A person who has been around Maple his whole life cautioned my about ordering he had a friend who lost a season to an overbooked small evap maker and I guess I should have listened. Cause its not like Farm Credit cares about it, they still want the loan payment. I can cover that but now all of this year's farm expansion is on hold.

Sap ran good in Northwood today. Hauled an am load to Josh and probably will haul a smaller pm load. All last year my vac gauge said 22 but I wasn't getting much sap. Same thing tuesday turned it all on and it was reading 22. Thought that was odd cause I hadn't fixed any leaks. Swapped that out with a new one and it was reading 5. Had some leaks and 2 hollow trees even with a small releaser can leak I'm pulling 20ish so I guess that's good.

[MapleSaint]

Sorry to hear of your bad luck. More time to fine tune lines and sugar house I guess:mad:

[NHguy]

that stinks so sorry to hear

[red maples]

Sorry man that sucks...

[Dill]

Well there is a rumor a large shiny piece of stainless is rolling this way for sunday delivery. Trying not to get my hopes up. But wondering what the long term forecast is going to turn into. I have 250 taps that just need to be drilled here. Too bad my helping neighbor just took off for spring break about 2 hours ago.

[Russell Lampron]

My forecast is calling for a frost tonight and another one Sunday night. The long range forecast is predicting freezing nights starting next weekend. If we can survive this next week we will be back into sap weather for maple weekend. I hope that the shiny stainless gets there as promised. I'm on vacation next week and will have to take a road trip to come see it.

[red maples]

Well good luck... this week doesn;t look to good but by next weekend if things don;t change and the trees don't bud it looks like the really good sap weather.

[Dill]

I'm seeing that freeze sunday too Russ followed by a bunch of rain and not too high temps. Hopefully the trees hold out. The odd thing is it the same forecast up in the Northeast Kingdom this is some odd weather.
But more importantly if it shows up come on down!

[MapleSaint]

Dill that's good news. Hope it all works out for you. Hopefully maple weekend is a go. Fingers crossed.

[Dill]

So the truck showed up just before noon yesterday. Had a stream of friends and family stop by through the install to help out. Including a plumber friend with his service truck. Still took a while. I got to bed around 3am after half an hour of test boil. There are some really nice features on this rig and a couple things I'm going to have to tweak. Fittings are all standard dairy fittings which I"m really impressed with. David would have kept firing til we ran out of sap. But I needed sleep. We had stopped all wiring on the sugar mansion 2 weeks ago. So my electrician is out there now putting a 220 switched outlet in for the steam away blower cause that was running off my generator last night. I'll have some pics and review once I actually sleep some more.
Hope it gets cold. Yesterday was nice and cold, haven't checked for sap run yet.
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[Dill]

Just pulled off my first gallon and a half. I'm not getting great performance yet. But so far I'm chalking that up to inexperience with this rig and bad wood. I"m taking the big husky to fix that problem tomorrow morning.

[Dill]

Boiled 350 gallons of sap today, ended up bottling 4 gals of dark/very dark, which tastes surprisingly lighter. Getting to know the new rig a bit more. Hoping to boil again on wensday if we keep getting good sap.

[Dill]

Had a good run last night. First full tank in a long time. Boiling this afternoon. Spilled some sap on the pump muffler and I wasn't getting much of a maple smell. Would and my sock filter started plugging up so I had quite a bit of sap that overflowed into the truck bed which is never good.

[Dill]

Made 6 gals tonight. The first drawoff had an odd flavor almost burnt coffeish. Hoping that dissipates when it cools.

[BAP]

I had some a few days ago that I thought tasted a little flunky. I left it in the canner overnight and tasted it the next day and it tasted fine.

[Dill]

Well this was it. Made 6 gals last night that tasted a bit off when it was hot. Went up this morning and yup the season is over. Now I have to spend the weekend cleaning up after what can only be described as extremely disappointing.

[Dill]

That thumping sound is me kicking myself. Plugged the plug on the pump thursday afternoon. And suddenly yesterday everyone said the flavor got better. I just went up to pull tap this afternoon and the tank was full and that means only half the taps emptied into it without the vac. So I hauled a load home and plugged the pump back in. The sap that spilled on the exhaust smelled much better and the off flavors in that batch went away sitting in the canner a couple days. Who knows.

[Russell Lampron]

Glad to hear that you are getting some sap to run through that shiny new evaporator. It would be a shame to have to clean it when you really didn't have a chance to get it dirty.

I thought that the syrup that you had me taste was good for a very dark syrup.

[Dill]

Glad I plugged back in. Made another 4 gals this afternoon. I don't want to know what the sugar content is. But like the wife said this is the time of year to make syrup, and the trees are already tapped might as well boil. Russ I got that 5 gals bottled up for ya. I'm hoping to haul what runs tomorrow and fire up in the late afternoon.

[Dill]

Sap dog and I boiled down the sweet today. A bit odd doing the final boil with everything froze up. Had to heat the head tank to get the water flowing. I"ve had the final boil in weather so warm you couldn't even stand in the sugarhouse. Also Mother nature decided to show me how cool boiling concentrate is. I had drawn the sweet off into a plastic barrel which then froze about 2 inches thick all the way around. I don't have a refractomenter but it was darn sweet. Things happen a bit faster that way. Still have to finish the last batch on a pot and a burner but it tastes good.