I tapped 14 trees the weekend before last here in East Haddam, CT. I collected 21-22 gallons by this past Sunday morning and set to evaporating with what appears to be the standard noobie system; a Turkey fryer type set up and a couple of propane tanks.. I reduced 17 gallons of sap down to about three between 9am and 5 pm but I had 5:30 dinner reservations so I added the remaining 5 gallons of sap and put the big pot in the snow and shoveled additional snow up around the sides.. I got back into it tuesday and boiled the pot down to around 1 gallon or a little more before bring it inside to finish on the stove. I ended up with about .4 gallons of syrup and I'd say it was a success for a first effort but I also learned a LOT from this first effort..

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first: and this I knew going into it but, Propane and a tall narrow pot is not the best set up for evaporating a lot of water.. I have another option or two for next time or perhaps next year if I add more taps.. The propane is easy which is nice..

second: are there any tricks to filtering? I ran raw sap through cheesecloth but my buckets were pretty well sealed so that was really not needed at all and I also skimmed the boiling sap on a regular basis. I then filtered finished syrup through a 5qt maple syrup cone filter (from "The Felt Store") while the syrup was hot off the stove. The filter was hanging in my cleaned out turkey fryer pot with the lid on it and I put the pot on the stove with low heat under it and let it sit.. Even after at least 15-20 minutes I had about 1/3 of my syrup sitting in the filter and the level really hadn't changed in almost 10 minutes.. I ended up gently pouring some of the syrup out of the filter into the pot hopefully leaving any heavy stuff in the bottom of the filter.
I got the impression that there just wasn't enough weight in that little bit of left over syrup to push it through the filter.. Perhaps a pre-filter would have helped though? Perhaps there are better filter methods for small scale production?

third: the farberware analog candy thermometer I have is horrible for this.. It's slow to respond to temp changes, I think it's off my a degree or two, and it's hard to read. I stopped boiling when I was somewhere in the 217-220 range.... More because it seemed right than because the thermometer told me it was at the right temp.. I already ordered a digital thermometer with a remote sensor..

fourth: Probably due to my pouring in the unfiltered syrup from the filter cone or due to a lack of accuracy with my syrup temperature I had a bit of cloudy material settle out in the bottom half inch of my containers a day after bottling.. I am assuming this will end up being some sugar sand that's forming in the bottles now? Is this due to my filter mishap, over or under temperature finishing, something else entirely? Oh and after I filtered the syrup I returned it to the smaller pot and brought it just up to boiling before I bottled it.


* that was a lot of typing. I hope I didn't bore you... I'm stoked on this whole process though! I'll be fervently looking at a ton of other threads on the forum and in this sub-forum while my buckets are filling back up....

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