Eastern Ontario 2016

Thanks Jeff,

from an experienced arch guy those are very good tips. I'm glad to hear no difference in taste. We will try bringing the fire a bit closer to the pans, and put on a door

Warm water won't hurt the hydrometer I use mine withh boiling syrup I keep the cup and meter in the SAP pan as it boils to keep it preheated( fill the cup with raw SAP) if you do this. When your ready to use dry off meter and rince out SAP with hot syrup and test.
Just a FYI if you don't know , give your meter a little time to compensate for what ever tempatures your testing at to get a really accurate reading.

Thanks, I tested all my finished syrup off cold. I don't have an arch or a SAP pan so cannot immerse the therm or therm cup, or make nearly enough per batch to rinse out therm cup with hot syrup...reason why I bought a *Quebec* hydrotherm was because it was same price as all the other therms and it is meant to measure hot and cold syrup. I doubt that a quick rinse with warm water would affect readings.

I'd just much rather do testing with cold syrup cause then I don't have to worry about syrup getting too hot and more nitre forming, not to mention even a small saucepan used to bring syrup back up to heat would still end up being coated with syrup that I have to scrape out. Much, much easier to just get therm in therm cup, fill with cold syrup and let the therm bob til it reaches its happy place and stays put. Then I can just dump the cold syrup, only from the therm cup, back into the batch and lose very little syrup from inside the therm cup.

Happy Easter everybody Sat and Sunday were great days boiled off 260 gallons, down to concentrate I am going to finish this morning.
Still have glitch with my new set up I'm trying to work through.
Over all impressed with my boil rate of about 19 to 21 gph.
I'm looking at maybe 1 more run this week and hoping my trees give me 1000 liters to do 1 more boil,weatherr looks good for it so crossing my fingers.

I'm back lol,
Just finished and bottled 28 liters from my 2 day boil.
That's a total of 8.5 gallons for the season ..
After bottling I went to the bush and my trees are pumping collect 500 liters of Sap between noon yesterday till 3 PM today and it's still flowing like mini rivers on the mainlines ;)

Since this am I've collected 50+l, and just walked the trees, at least another 5g out there, and it's only been 3.5 hrs since last collection...trying to wait til 7pm to go collect, was able to press the castiron woodstove and the 4in deep hotel pan into play with pre-heated sap to reduce a few litres...I hope to see a gallon or two gone by morning once it's stoked up for the night cause the burners will be off!!

Argh!! how am I going to be able to go to work this week, come home and deal with all the frickin sap and not lose a) my mind; b) my sanity; c) my sap or d) all of the above? Fer example last night I turned off the burners at midnight, walked the trees, my best trees were still going. Fell asleep about 1am. Woke up 7am. Collected 23l at 7:30am. Noon did another collection of 31l. And the weekend's almost over, I have to work tomorrow and all week...definitely going to be running on fumes most of the time. Argh!!!

From dusk last night to dusk today I collected 185L. :o I think the sap gods took pity on me and the trees after hitting them so hard with the ice storm.

Wow what a day. I emptied everything around noon and went back out at 7:30 and everything was flowing over. Collected over 300 gallons today. Unfortunately due to family obligations there was no boiling. I have a busy next couple days trying to get caught up and it was still running hard when I came in. I think the end is in sight for me. A couple more good days will put me over 50 gallons of syrup and then I will pull the plug.

75L from 8 trees today. Had to go empty the buckets at 10pm 'cause they would never last until morning.

Had to collect the buckets three times today,have NEVER done that before,good thing there is only 40 of them!! Sap from tubing I think was around 2100-2200 gallons,hard to keep track of since the tanks were constantly either going over or threatening to. Had to shut down for Family supper,went back down and ran another 800 gallons through the rig to take the edge off.