Scorching incident while sweetening pans

[The Heldeberg Sapper]

Had a little incident yesterday and wanted to share. I was away all weekend and came home yesterday afternoon to two 55 gallon drums overflowing, so i started boiling right away. I was starting with an empty evaporator as i was in a two week freeze and had cleaned and drained after my last boil. So anyways based on past experience i was expecting to run about 70-80 gallons or so to get the pans sweetened before i would get close to making syrup. I am running an oil tank evaporator with a 2x3 flat back pan and a 2x2 front syrup pan, which i average 20gph with. Well anyways at the 1.5 hr mark (30 gallons added plus the initial 10 to fill pans to 1.5" depth) i was standing there watching it boil and all of a sudden i saw the dreaded yellow smoke starting to come from the syrup channel and i looked at the temp gauge and i was +50 over boiling point so i quickly dumped some sap into the syrup channel by picking up the preheater and tipping it over. I shut the valve between the pans and started draining and filtering the front pan (after things cooled down some of course). It just started to scorch the syrup channel where there was damage from a previous incident a few years back. I was able to clean that out and wash and clean the pan and get things going again. I am going to boil down the sweet inside and see if its palatable, right now i cant taste any burnt but it might become cooking syrup.

Anyways the reason for this post is i wanted to share my theory on why this happened. Like i mentioned i was away all weekend and we had some solid 20 degree nights and high 30s during the day. I believe that the freezing and thawing of the sap in the barrels created a concentrate on the bottom of the barrel and that is what i collected and boiled first, it must have been closer to 4% or higher as i typically hover around that 2% or so on the sap. Anyways just wanted to share and see if this has happened to anyone else. Oh well one more thing to add to the list of things to pay attention to.

Some pics of my "operation".
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[ecolbeck]

Sorry to hear about your incident. I've certainly scorched my own pans for various reasons. People who use RO systems are boiling concentrated sap all the time, so we are used to the faster processing times that accompany those systems. Your setup looks great!!

[Pdiamond]

Glad you were able to catch it quickly and save everything. Let us know how the syrup turns out.

[The Heldeberg Sapper]

I boiled the "burnt" sweet down last night on the stove and ended up with 3 quarts of Very Dark (18%) syrup. There was no noticeable burnt taste, in fact it didnt really taste like much of anything. I had my wife try some and she said it doesnt taste bad but doesn't taste like my usual syrup (Amber) and that it was lacking of flavor overall. I just put it in Mason jars for personal use and will probably end up using it for cooking or try it on some pancakes.

[berkshires]

Anyways the reason for this post is i wanted to share my theory on why this happened. Like i mentioned i was away all weekend and we had some solid 20 degree nights and high 30s during the day. I believe that the freezing and thawing of the sap in the barrels created a concentrate on the bottom of the barrel and that is what i collected and boiled first, it must have been closer to 4% or higher as i typically hover around that 2% or so on the sap. Anyways just wanted to share and see if this has happened to anyone else. Oh well one more thing to add to the list of things to pay attention to.


That makes perfect sense. Good thing to keep an eye out for!

GO

[The Heldeberg Sapper]

The worst part is i was standing there 2ft away watching it all boil, monitoring levels, etc but never occurred to me that i would making syrup so early so i never even thought to look at the giant temp dial gauge (well i did early on and it was at +1). Sometimes you just have to learn things the hard way i guess hahaha.