To ro or not to ro?

[randolphvt]

I ran a short test yesterday. I did 2 pints surgar with ro and 2 pints without ro.
Without ro tasted better. Nothing was changed about the boil and the sap came from the same container.
I just found that interesting. I know it's opinionated but was surprised.
I know big mass producers must ro and with fuel expenses skyrocketing it makes sense to ro.
HMM....
pay all your pans be sweet and full of gold.
-jeez.. I sound like a gold panner-I am. lol
I will definitely be gold mining with Gold expected to hit 2700/oz.
Hope everyone has a good season.

[maple flats]

I suspect it was just in your head. Professional taste testers can't taste a difference in RO vs no rO syrup until you get to very high RO production. For that reason, those who RO to over 25% sugar use evaporators with smaller flue pans and much larger syrup pans. Read about how Proctor Maple Research center does it when boiling 35% concentrate. Very small Flue pan and huge syrup pan, to give it time to develope that perfect flavor.

[Aaron Stack]

Thinking strongly about a RO Bucket for next year.

Question though. If you start with say 1.5% sap and RO it up to 8%, will I still get the very dark color, or will it lighten the grade due to the higher sugar content being boiled?

[ecolbeck]

Higher sugar means less time in the pan but that factor is counteracted by the heating of the sap by the RO pump which darkens the syrup.

[maple flats]

An RO can give you lighter syrup, but that only starts as you concentrate to above about 10%, A bucket RO is not able to get that unless you run thru more than 2x, and doing that will darken the syrup more still. To get lighter you would need an RO capable of getting 10+% in one pass.

[LMP Maple]

The only flavor difference I have noticed in year one is the flavor of actually being able to have dinner with my family while I have the RO working outside :) I love this machine. My experience this year is the more I RO it the darker the finished product is. if I do one pass and take it to 4 I can still make light stuff. When I batch it to 5-6 it is darker at the end. Just what I have seen here on my first year with it.

[ebliese]

We are on the first year of using an RO. Tasting the syrup from this year so far, we have not noticed a difference in flavor. Our grade has been right on the border of Golden and Amber from the batches we have bottled. So if we didn't RO, we could have had Golden but then we'd be dealing with 10+ hour boils. The RO has allowed us to double our tap count while lowering the time spent boiling. Usually we get between 100-130 gallons of sap and with the RO, we have found it takes about 3-3.5 hours to boil (includes start up and shut down). We do two passes with most of the sap. That is very nice considering we had some 4+ hour boils last year.