2023 Season ?

[dcast99]

With no real winter this year and the forecast not looking to good, my buddy and I decided we will tap this Friday. Let's hope for the best.

[dcast99]

Cooked 650 gals of sap today. After sweetening the pans, we made about 10 gals of syrup.

[dcast99]

The season has been going slow but steady. No big runs, even after some of the harder freezes. Need more sunny days, but not when the temps are higher. Collected 2000 gal of sap so far and made 34 gal of nice syrup. Sugar % of sap is normal.

[dcast99]

Tapped trees on 2/3, untapped on 3/19. Got over 3800 gals of sap and made 73.5 gals of nice syrup. Our best year ever. The syrup got dark in the middle of the season but turned lighter towards the end of the season. Strange year indeed. No big runs all year. Only 8 boils. Had 2 ongoing problems this year. 1st - getting pint jugs. Bought out both dealers supply within a 2hour radius of us and barely had enough. 2nd - Occasionally the filter press would start spraying syrup out between the plates. We put 2-3 6gal batches of syrup thru the press each day. It would work fine for the 1st batch but on the 2nd it might start spraying no matter how slow we started the batch and only halfway thru. No torn papers and same cleaning process between days. Did this twice. Might go two days before it did it again. Will have to work on that for next year.

A little disappointed that no one else in the state chimed in on how the season was going.

Have a good off season.