Spring Harvest 2015

Busy weekend this year. Surprisingly good turnout yesterday considering the weather. Excellent turnout today for a Sunday...a steady flow all day. Wish we had more syrup. FD Pancake breakfast broke the record books. They had a great turnout both days. Only had minor issues this weekend. Everything ran pretty smoothly.
Got enough sap Friday to run the RO and boil all day Sat., but after three days without a freeze, the trees slowed way down on Sat. and could only run the evap on Sunday. We have about 800 gal of sap sitting at the house ready to go for tomorrow night's boil.
Thanks to Alden for his help this weekend. He was great showing people outside how the sap is collected and initially processed using the RO machine.
Hope everyone else had a good weekend.

So I'm just going to pollute Josh's thread this year. I've been having issues with my releaser this year, that I think I finally fixed. At first it was a bent rod. So I swapped them out with a spare Josh had along with the old style float. It hung up last week on me and then worked for a short run. Sunday I couldn't get it to dump. Spent an hour leveling it to no avail. It would starting filling, move the op rod about a 1/3 of the way up. And then the float would be under sap it wouldn't dump. Maple weekend wiped me out and after an hour I gave up. Figured the ice must have bent the rod. So I go back tonight to pull the rod and try to straighten it out. The float seemed heavy when I uscrewed the rod from the lid. Turns out it was full of ice and sap. Put the new style float on and it started dumping no problem. Wish I had thought of that before.

Alden, I swear, I didn't set you up with a leaking float ;) But seriously, when I picked the float up, I couldn't believe how heavy it was, and it didn't go in that heavy, so the float picked up sap since you installed it, but for the life of me, I can't find it leaking back out anywhere. You'd think if the sap found a way to get it that it would find a way back out. I think I'll drill a little pin hole in it to drain the sap, and then seal it back over.

Collected another 500 gallons yesterday. SSC is holding steady at 2%. Boiled off 1300 gal total yesterday. After boiling raw sap all day Sunday, forgot how boring it was while waiting for the rig to sweeten back up. The concentrate level mysteriously got up to 19% yesterday. I played with the valves so concentrate level matched the evap. and all of a sudden I went form 11% to 19%...nice! Since Sunday was spent puttering along, I was making really dark syrup. Took about 7 gal of syrup to get lighter stuff in and back up to a Dark Robust.

Took the time last night to drain the flue pan and dumped a bunch of permeate in. A lot of niter in the flue pan, more like a sludge layer on the pan vs. baked on like it does in the syrup pan. Sap in the flue pan has color, so the sugars are caramelizing in the flue pan. Hopefully now the flue pan will be clean and that the grade will keep coming up. Before maple weekend, I was just over the line from a Amber Rich. Trying hard to use the new grades, but I have to think about which one to use.

I have to think about it too but if you leave off the flavor descriptor it's easier to remember. I explained it to a lot of people over the weekend so that helped too. I like the hand outs and poster from the NHMPA better than the ones from the state. The one from the state with the brown background and arrows everywhere is kind of confusing.

Agreed. teaching about it helped me too. Some people still don;t get it. I had a woman email me and she is a regular wanted to know if I had quarts of Dark or grade B, I explained the new grades but at the time she called I just had very dark bottles and didn't have the dark done yet. I told her they were in they were in the stand. she said great. She stopped by the stand and she read the flyer that I posted and saw the flavor descriptor of strong taste and got scared. She email me and said she thought it was gonna taste bad so she went to the farm store and bought a qt of Grade A medium. this woman buys Grade b from me all the time. she loves the flavor I told her its the same thing. I explained the whole thing to her again and she finally got it. So there still is alot of confusion out there.

Some people think that they changed the grades just to confuse people. I told them that it was to get all of the maple producing world on the same grading system. I pointed out that Quebec, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York all had their own different systems. They understood better after that.

I think its going to take producers as long to get used to it as consumers. We had to explain the old grades all the time too. This is why I just stand outside and explain why we need maple trees in order to make maple syrup.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Russell Lampron

Some people think that they changed the grades just to confuse people. I told them that it was to get all of the maple producing world on the same grading system. I pointed out that Quebec, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York all had their own different systems. They understood better after that.

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This is my second year using the grading system and this explanation seems to be the easiest way to describe the reason for the change. All the other factors, flavor descriptors, etc...people don't really get. Dark syrup lovers, at least here in VT, also like the fact that there will be Very Dark syrup available for retail.

Sap ran haaard yesterday. Collected 400 gal first thing in the am to empty the tank. Collected another 945 gal in the afternoon...that's more than 1gpt in about 8hrs. It's also about 1.5gpt in 24 hrs. About time. Today's shaping up to be another good one. So with our 1345 gal, Alden's 300 gal, and Mark's 350 gal, we had a busy night. Made somewhere around 45-50 gallons of syrup in 5 hrs from startup to shutdown. It may be a record for us. We've processed this much sap before, but I don't think with the SSC all being over 2%. Finally able to start putting syrup into storage. Vac's up to 24.5-25" gained 1/2" since Monday. Didn't do anything in the woods, but still need to walk another mainline to check for leaks.

So Monday night I had the bright idea of draining my flue pan and filling with permeate. It turned that night into a late night. Well, I picked a bad day to do it because we didn't get things put back together and fired up until 9pm. My intent is to do things like this during the weekend, but I didn't want to wait for another XXX gal of syrup going through it without a cleaning.

New grades. When I was explaining it to people, I told them we need to tell you how it's going to taste, and we go by color. Personally, I think using a light, medium, dark, and very dark standard is fine. Using Golden, Amber, Dark, and Very Dark is more confusing. They just need to know which is the lightest and which is the darkest. I think NY and ME had it right all along.

We had it right in NH. We could sell anything darker than dark amber as grade B as long as it tasted good. In VT and other places if it was darker than the B sample in the test kit it was commercial even if it was the best tasting syrup you had ever made. Everybody has that now with the new grading system.