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Hmm.... I already have a water jacket honey bottler. A few years ago we lost our whole crop (100 gallons) to that bottler. We poured our filtered refrigerated crop into the bottler and turned the...

Okay, I have a lot of syrup in 55 gallon drums and don't have a good way to bottle it. Everything thing I see from the maple distributors looks hookie. Here is what I am thinking:

55 Gallon Drum...

We are in Day 4 of sap runs in east central Minnesota. They have been light average runs, but I'll take it!

We are still learning our new equipment, and in our growing pans have burned it several time. Our hand bag of cleaning the pan have been:

Fresh boiling water
Stiff Nylon brushes
Pressure washer...

We are learning our new equipment too. We have oil fired evaporator with continuous flow syrup pan that we can switch directions on with an automatic draw off. In this steamy picture, we just...

ARGHH!!!! It's now 2013 and I'm STILL having problems with this vaccuum pump... last year we discovered noises were coming from water accumulating in the oil resevoir, fortunately when we took the...

I tapped some of my best producing trees last week just for fun (my indicator trees). We had a long hard freeze this winter without snow cover, so I don't expect to get an "early" run even if the...

We premake our droplines at 30". If a tree takes two taps, we splice the lateral line with two seperate droplines and we have sixty inches of room to work with.

Two Splices
...

We have three sugarbushes and one sugarhouse (retrofitted existing building). All on seperate pieces of land. Our collection tanks are near the paved road and we pump our sap into our truck tank...

I too had a new Marcland auto-draw off last year in the season that did not happen and did not get to use it much and it did not work as I'd like. Is there any thing you all do to trest/train your...

I decided to only tap 2000 trees in that woods this year. I am limited in the ability to create new paths in the woods, so with existing paths and topography I will do 1000 on the "Stu Peterson...

For right or wrong, I decided to use the new Check Valve (CV2) with the 2000 buckets / gravity tubing I'll be using in 2013. I will be having some hired help and it costs the same amount in labor to...

:( What a sad sight. Sorry for your loss, hope that was worst of your damages, although think you'll have a lot of chainsaw work to do to get ready for sugaring season.

In my case the woods are also used as a summer camp for hundreds of children (most of the woods in my area were cleared for farming/house), so tubing is not feasible. There is topography on the...

So doing the math outloud:

You're spending ave. 3.5hrs of labor person x 5 people = 17.5 man hours a day for collecting 1400 taps (variation in sugarbush excluded, your trees may be more or less...

Maple Frank, we need to talk!!!

In the past we worked 300 buckets on taps. I know have 650 on tubing. We have another sugarbush with approximately 4000 mature trees. We can not tube this...

I am new to the buying and selling of sap. Next year, I am interested in processing sap for other people as we now have the equipment to do so. I am fairly sure that my customers want syrup out of...

We are having a dismal sugaring season in east-central Minnesota. We had little snow, so the forest ground froze hard. We had ideal sugaring weather December, January, and Feb (NOT normal), those...

Argh!!! My first season using a vacuum is NOT going well, and it does not help that it is such a horrible sugaring season in my area making it essential I have a functional vacuum pump.

I have a 3...

On a related note, I had to install a custom built-double walled insulated chimney on our new oil-fired evaporator becuase the building inspectors would not allow us to install the one provided by...

Can you all give me some ideas about the kind of business arrangements out there related to boiling sap for other people:

-50% of syrup?
-Cost of fuel and labor to boiling.filter.store?
-Other...

Love the ingenuity!!! Nice work!

I have a budget this year to purchase a maple cream machine and a maple candy machine. I'd love some more input on these devices other than just a catalog description or sales pitch. What machines...

Tell me more about this 5.5 Briggs and Straton. Stainless steel? Electric? GPM?

Thanks. I haven't seen anything like that, yet, so I'll tap as I normally would. Hoping for more moisture soon!