math problem

[berkshires]

If you're just looking for a quick calculation you can do in your head at 3 AM after a long night of boiling, a simple rule is this: Your average sugar maple puts out 2% sap, and it takes around 40:1 to turn that into syrup.

So if a batch of syrup takes around 80 gallons of sap per gallon of syrup, your sap is running around 1%.

That make sense?

[DrTimPerkins]

The Jones Rule of 86 is OK for ballpark and for sap. The higher the sugar level, the larger the error. It is good up to about 5%, which is about the highest you're likely to find for sap (if you're darn lucky). It isn't so good for concentrate, especially for higher levels of concentrate.

For one thing, the Jones Rule (named for CH Jones, a Professor at UVM who did a lot of work on maple back in the early 1900s) was designed for 65 Brix syrup and it was designed to be a rough estimate if you were dealing with sap sugar levels.

Here is an example to illustrate the error involved at high sugar levels. Let's say you start with 1 gal of syrup at 66 Brix. How much syrup does it take to make one gallon of syrup from this gallon of syrup. Obviously the answer is 1 gallon. But using the Jones Rule of 86, you get the answer of 1. 3 gallons of syrup at 66 Brix to make 1 gallon of syrup at 66 Brix (86/66 = 1.3). Clearly this is wrong. At low sap sugar levels, it doesn't matter much. The higher you get, the larger the error.

Full paper is at http://www.uvm.edu/~pmrc/jones.pdf Other literature on different subjects at http://www.uvm.edu/~pmrc

More on the history of maple science at UVM at http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/s...nter/83992300/ and http://cdi.uvm.edu/collections/getCo....xql?pid=maple
Enjoy!

[tbear]

Dr.Tim, I've got to ask, do you carry this stuff around in your head? A heck of an extremely organized library? Just, wow! Ted

[Galena]

OK well then my big sugars are kicking over the traces, cause going by those same calculations I have 3-4% sugar....not at all unusual for me to go fire up a batch of say 5l nearup ndrawn down from usually around 100l sap either way, thinking I'm gonna get maybe 2.5l and instead get closer to 4. And yep my syrup brixes out at the red line.

[spud]

When I calculate my sap I use 87.1 so if my sap is 2% it takes 43.55 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup.

Spud