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Brought back 120 gls collected since Saturday's hard freeze. Will test the sap to see if it's any good. Will hopefully boil that down today then clean out the evap for the season. Tap holes are drying out and no more hard freezes in the forecast. Will untap this weekend.
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So I am boiling down my last 30 gallons tonight. This will put me at about 3 gallons of syrup on the season! It is weird my mid week boil yielded some darker syrup, but the stuff i finished last night came out much lighter again! Anyone ever have that happen to them? Also I tried making maple cream for the first time last night. I think it came out great.
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Finished cleaning out the evap today. Made 2 1/4 gls of dark syrup from what was in the pans. Made 32.3 gls for the year with most of it being golden or amber. In several ways it was our worst year since we started cooking our own sap down in 2013. The extremely low sugar content in the middle of the season really killed our overall sap to syrup ratio. We normally get 45 to 1 but this year it went down to 56 to 1. In 2015 we made a record high of 73 gls of syrup but in 2016 we made a record low of only 41 1/2 gls. This year broke the record low record with only 32.3 gls of syrup. Hopefully next year will be a "normal" season with constant temps.
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The year
Pulled all the 3/16" down this year to compare the work compared to fixing all the squirrel/deer damage plus easy to clean, always a sad happy day but can't wait till next year as I'm building a RO with some great help from here!!