Tapping the 2013 Season

[Springfield Acer]

RIP 2013!
We gathered another measly 45 gallons of "good enough" and dumped some others. I finished by pushing thru 30 gallons of water and am all done except finishing a bit from the front pan. 3745 gallons of sap for about 68 gallons of the sweet stuff.
The buckets and their taps are in the garage waiting for the cleaning.
I've gotta run the taps and days to see what the per tap numbers are and post all that on the other thread.
For those of you still able to get product, I hope you can keep it coming in.
Now I've gotta move some of this stuff!
For me, all I can say is "what a year"!

[Gary R]

My final boil was yesterday. 5155gal of sap for the year. I still need to finish what was on the front pan. I did get all the tubing and every tank cleaned with bleach. I also got the evaporator acid cleaned yesterday. Last 5gal of syrup is buddy.

[unc23win]

My sap will probably be done running today. Had a pretty good weekend. The trees did fairly well for me it was a record season 280 gallons of syrup so far. None of it has been dark. Next year I will be looking to get all of my taps on vacuum.

[FunnyFarm]

tapped 70 birch yesterday got over 100 gallons of sap already and its running at a steady trickle...on my way up the mountain to start tapping buckets.

[Gary R]

Took a night off. I hopefully will get totals in a couple of days. A backyarding neighbor stopped last night. He was talking to the biggest producer in western PA a couple of weeks ago. He made 960gal of syrup in ONE day on one of the warm days in early March!

[Dave Y]

Here sit at 2am posting on the Trader because I am still boiling. Got back from Pittsburgh at 12:30 pm and had 3500 gal of sap to boil.then we brought in another 2500.leaving 2000 at the vacuum. Plus whatever is buckets. So I will be boiling awhile. will break 800 before morning.

[Sugarmaker]

Randy, Gary, Dave folks,
We are cleaning equipment and taking a few nights off to relax Lots of records broken this year. Didn't burn anything up or have any broken bones either. Dave you caught up real fast! That's a lot of sap! Gary got in 4 months of season. Randy made a lot of syrup too. I will try to post stats in other post.
Regards,
Chris

[FunnyFarm]

Just un tapped all the birch trees gathered about 700 gallons of sap half way through cooking it down its looking like it'll end up about 5 gallons. It certainly isn't maple syrup and it surely took WAY longer to cook down . In the end its not bad stuff.We'll see how the little we got sells and decide how many trees we'll tap next year.We'll definitely be finishing off our maple season with a birch season from here out though...

[BC Birch Tapper]

It is a different tree, different sugars & different end use. One has to educate the consumer about any new product & emphasize that it in NOT Maple so it won't taste the same or have the same application. it is used more in cooking than as a table syrup

[FunnyFarm]

About as soon as we had syrup the wife set to making a birch sauce for chicken and some pumpkin birch cookies...The sauce was really good and the cookies are long gone...lol