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MapleLady, I can relate to your struggles. We filtered our first 2 weeks' worth of syrup (a little over 2 gallons) the other night, and it was very frustrating! We have a 40 cup coffee percolator,...

Thanks TerryEspo, these bottles do have the caps screwed on already, and I was thinking it looked like they might not make a good seal anymore. I guess I won't use any more of them. They'll...

We have a couple of gallons of syrup to bottle, and I have a quick question. We've always used mason jars up to this point, but I was given a dozen glass syrup jars (the kind that Tractor supply...

You're right that there isn't much space under the grate, so maybe we should raise it some. There is not really any good place for combustion air to enter right now. We were having to run it with...

I have thought about converting a pan to drop tube, but can't decide if it's worth it for 1 or 2 years until we get a real pan. If I remember correctly, we have sand in the back of the firebox to...

I believe the smoke stack is about 10 feet tall. Last year was the first year using this set up and we were struggling to keep the back pan boiling. I think this was largely due to cold sap, but...

We have an oil tank evaporator, which currently has 3 steam table pans. It is lined with insulation and firebricks, but does not have a blower of any kind. We really need to get better GPH (we were...

You can use a paste of cream of tartar and vinegar for the soot on the bottoms... I don't really have a good solution for the burnt on syrup other than vinegar and scrubbing really hard...

Last year we did wash the bottoms of the pans between boils, but mostly because they would get soot everywhere if we didn't. We usually rub the (cool) pan in the snow to get as much off as we can,...

yeah, that's true that it's not usually as warm as they say it'll be.. especially in Sandwich, where our trees are... it's just nerve wracking seeing the forecast with so few lows in the 20's in the...

Looking at next week's forecast, there are no lows in the 20's... This is only our 2nd year, but I thought we need 20's to keep the sap flowing... is it likely that the season could end this week??? ...

We'll be washing ours this time, since we used snow to fill the pans with after the sap was gone... but had we used clean water we would have just dumped it and used as is... unless of course the...

MJFlores- if you have the freezer space, you can freeze that 2 gallons and boil it with you sap next week. That's what we did 2 weeks ago, and it worked out fine.

At least you had sap to boil down... we didn't have ANYTHING this week. It's weird to not be boiling down on a Sat in March.

Whenever it rains we usually end up with yellow sap in a few buckets... I believe it is the rainwater off trees and such getting in the bucket... we've boiled it down and it's fine.

Sounds like you've been bit bad! Last year we had about 11 taps, this year we have 14 or 15, and will add some more as soon as we get more buckets... Have fun this weekend! Our sap didn't run this...

So on Saturday when we were boiling down I spilled about a Tablespoon of coffee (with cream and sugar) into a five gallon bucket full of sap :o .. now we only had 25 gallons of sap to begin with, so...

Boiled down about 25 gallons of sap... had to figure out how to keep the smoke stack up, and hadn't gotten the front pan in the mail yet, so it took about 5 hours to go from 25 gallons to 3 gallons,...

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Here's one picture of the new evaporator. Planning on doing our first batch of sap on it tomorrow, so we'll have more pics tomorrow.

We fired up our new oil tank evaporator today. It was awesome! It took about 20 minutes to get the pans boiling(the water was quite cold to start), which seems pretty good to me... I'm going to try...

We did weekend boils last year and that was fine... they say the grade might be darker, but we still had some pretty light syrup.
My questions about this topic is can you freeze the sap (we have...

I know there are lots of people who have experience with this, but from what I read, some do mess with the thermostats in them ( I wouldn't have any idea how) while many just heat it up with water...

I have several stainless bucket taps, which we tried to use last year with tubing (it was our first year and we hadn't really done enough planning/research ahead of time, so we went with what we...

I know I've read to replace plastic spiles every year, but I am not sure of the reason... is it just the bacteria issue... that yield will be reduced because of it? Or is there another reason, such...

Looking at the next 10 days... I think we'll tap Sunday... anyone in central NH think there will be any significant flow next week?