Pulling taps in southwestern Ohio

[Lazarus]

I'm starting to pull taps on Monday. It will take a few weeks to untap and clean all the lines. I would have started sooner but I was hopeful this past week of freezes would have yielded some late syrup. Sadly it is terrible sap, white and stinky.

All in all we ended with around 300 gallons of syrup, a lot of dark and very dark, no golden, very little amber. Less than I would have liked to make but it could have been worse. Never actually got out to tap walnuts!

Booked my trip to Vermont for the open house weekends at all the equipment makers at end of April. Looking for a new RO and a bottler. Give a shout if you're going too.

[milligkl]

I pulled my taps yesterday, vast majority were very dry. I'm not looking forward to the cleanup phase, and I discovered a couple of fallen trees on my lines that pulled the drops off of the line (sure I lost a fair amount of sap due to that).

What are you doing with your old RO and bottler? What speed RO do you have?

[Lazarus]

I don't actually have a bottler. We're still currently doing it in 5 gallon batches with a large heavy bottom stock pot and spigot, total pain. I saw the Lapierre automated bottling frame last year and I loved it, but I put off the purchase. Looking forward to hopefully seeing it in Vermont again this year. They had it set up last year with the overflows working, and the guy showed me a video of it set up with a mini conveyor. Totally awesome.

As far as the RO goes, my old one is a Leader Mini-Extreme, dual 4" posts. Leader doesn't seem to quote speeds on their new Extremes, but safe to say it's probably on par with your average 600. This was our third season with it. It was a great RO when we had 400 taps. I think it's probably fabulous for up to 1500 taps on gravity, maybe 1000 on vacuum. But at 2000+ taps on vacuum, we're pulling over 4000 gallons of sap on a good day and only have a few hours in the evening to concentrate and boil, and that is just way out of its league. The Mini will be up for sale. Let me know if you are interested :)

[bmbmkr]

Put me on the list for the RO if milligkl doesn't want it.