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Picked up another 250 gallons of sap today and boiled off 640 gallons. Boiled it off in record time and then just went ahead and canned everything that I boiled today instead of storing it for a couple of weeks. 13.125 gallons of beautful Light amber syrup. The 18.625 that I canned last week was medium and today was light. I have eliminated all of my black plastic mainlines but one and it is short and has a lot of taps and this is definitely helping with the syrup grades because sometimes I can't boil sap for 3 or 4 days. The bush I tapped on the 14th has ran 600 gallons of sap from 113 taps in basically 5 days. Not too bad for gravity taps with two 5/16" mainlines with 40+ taps. I have one section this year that has close to 90 taps on a 5/16" line and I am anxious to see how they do. They haven't done much in the past on a mainline, so they can't do any worse and hopefully this will help them kick a little harder. Either way, it will definitely increase sap quality a ton and in turn, the lower bacteria count is seeming to add up to a slightly higher sugar content. 2 years ago it was 57 to 1, last year it was 53 to 1 and this year I am running about 50 to 1.
I did set a record with the evaporator today. 640 gallons in 10.33 hours which include startup and shutdown which is 62gph. I had a bad startup playing with it some or I could have likely down even a little better. Will keep tweaking it as Jerry(802 maple) has been helping me some. I don't know if I can do much better, but might get it to 65gph or a little better, but if not, I am very happy with 60 or more gph.
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Just a side note, I didn't have hardly any sugarsand the entire boil. 640 gallons of sap later, the syrup pan looked almost like it had been cleaned. I ran the 13.125 thru the filter press and it hardly got to 20psi and I could have probably ran 50 to 100 thru it as clean as it was.
I know others disagree with me, but what I have almost always seen is that the better the sap quality, the lower the sugarsand. I really think a lot of what we call nitre or sugarsand is dead bacteria. The darker the syrup, the higher the bacteria count, the more "sugarsand" as we call it.
I know this is not always the case, but has always seemed to be that way for me most of the time. The sap that I had boiled before today wasn't as high of quality due to holding it for longer periods of time, thus more bacteria, more sugarsand and medium syrup.
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Brandon, sounds pretty neat what you are doing there. What ever you are doing is working..all that fine fancy stuff..yummy
what we call nitre or sugarsand is dead bacteria, i think you are correct with this, what else could it be>>
When i started i never could figure out what sugar sand could possibly be other than bacteria...
Charlie
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brandon, what are you using for mainline now instead of the black plastic?
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Keep going Brandon... those 5/16 mainlines seem to be working well! super experiment. I will be interested on how your season turns out in the end. sure would put a twist on the bigger is better and less taps per lateral thinking.
I'm sure everyones bush is different, but as you were telling me on the phone, you don't have a tremendous grade on that bush... very interesting.
Well I will tap Sat morn.. maybe start getting a run early week then it cools down again... yep global warming right?? I'm not too worried(yet) this is my normal time, usually get my first boil between the 1st and 6th of march.
Last year the taps went in early but waited for the thaw....
Last night spent time doing a quick rinse of my bucket drop lines.. and a few buckets that looked like they needed a cleaning(top of the pile) few more things to rinse....
After I set out some taps sat I will do a water boil just for final hot rinse of the evap and make sure everything is ready.. then LET IT POUR SAP !!
Next year..... hopefully 500 taps all tubing !!!
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Tapped my north side bush yesterday and put in 158 more taps which puts me just over 500. Seaon is usually over by 22nd of March here, so I am hoping for average of 1,000 gallon of sap for the next three weeks which would give me a good season as I boiled almost 1700 gallon in Feb.
More north side trees run really good, and by tapping them this late, they should survive a big warmup for several days which is very much a reality for me this time of year. 50's tommorrow and Monday after we had a deep freeze for 3 or 4 days and a few inches of snow. Tanks will likely be running over early Monday morning before I get to collect them as it is not showing a freeze tommorrow night. The next 2 weeks are usually about the best two of the year, so here we go.
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good luck Brandon, Looks like you are into BIGSAP MARCH.
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Brandon,
It is amazing the difference we are experiecing this season in comparsion to last season. Last year we boiled the first time on Feb. 25th. This year on Feb. 25th we was within 100 gallons of the sugarwater almount that we processed the whole season last year. We usually get some big runs around the first couple weeks of March. If the weather holds I believe we may break the camp record. The next two weeks will tell the story on that however..
Mark 220 Maple
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I guess yesterday was big sap day for me. I went over and started gathering about 2:30 this morning due to most of my trees being on other family members property and it is off limits on Sunday. I went over yesterday afternoon and checked out everything and transferred some lines to additional overflow tanks and the sap was running as hard as I have ever seen it run. It ran a little Saturday evening and then froze and picked back up yesterday morning. From yesterday morning until about 2am this morning, it ran close to 1,000 gallons of sap. Small freeze this morning from 2 to 8, and now the temp has spiked up to about 50. I gathered close to 800 gallon from 2:30 to 6:30 this morning and left close to 200 more in the woods. I imagine it should run fairly well for a while today, but will start tailing off this afternoon as temps are supposed to be 61 and wind is suppossed to pick back up. Cold from Wed until Sunday with temps as low as the teens and lots of precip which should fire the trees back up to do it again. Fired up the evaporator about 6:15 this morning and turned it over to a helper about 8. Another helper coming to boil from 9 to 4 and then the other helper will take over. I need to try to hold about 600 gallon of sap for the open house on Saturday. I am going to try chucking about 25 gallon of ice/frozen sap daily and with the very cold temps, it should be fine.
Yesterday was the type of run you only see maybe once every 3 or 4 years if you are lucky. I have elinimated almost all of my 1/2" mainline and the sap just roars the the 5/16" in mph. Sure makes for really good sap quality too.
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Brandon,
We were thinking about you yesterday when we ran 40+ taps on one 5/16 line. Those 40+ are on the end of the mainline and we wanted to grab as many as we could. Most of the tubing gurus say 5-10 taps on one 5/16 lateral. All ours are gravity so it will be interesting to see how it goes. Best.
Jim
