Getting ready

[minehart gap]

Hope you all are willing to help me with this. I want to make sure that I have thought of everything and am ready for the season. A little background: I have been making small quantities of maple syrup for a while now but never more than a quart or two and by using stainless steel pots on a wood stove. Also, after 27 years of being landlocked, I have finally persuaded a neighbor to sell a right of way to me for access to my mountain property (30 acres with a mix of maple (red and sugar), hickory, poplar and oaks. This being said, I will be making much more syrup this year than in the past. I plan to have 300 taps to start with the possibility of over 800 on the property.

My property is in the gap of a mountain therefore I have nearly 300 feet of elevation drop and am facing east-northeast so I have availability for gravity flow and a lot of it with early morning sun. I have purchased 300 each of the following: leader 3/16" tees, leader 3/16" stubby spouts and 300 leader check valve spout adapters as well a 5 rolls of 800', 3/16" leader tubing. I recently build a two handed tubing tool. I also have acquired a 600 gallon stainless steel bulk tank with valve (I need to purchase an adapter going from acme fitting to 3/4" hdpe pipe) and a 250 gallon bulk tank without valve and open top. Sap will then travel via. 3/4" pipe to the evaporator that is a 26"x 6' raised flue sap pan and a 26"x 2' syrup pan on a homemade arch which is nearly complete. My plan is for the syrup to exit the evaporator and travel through a homemade Optimizer style cone filter into a stainless steel stock pot with faucet. If syrup is hot enough after filtering, I will bottle it then if not I will reheat and bottle later but store syrup in plastic food grade 5 gal. buckets.

The sugar shack is a 14'x18' timber frame building that will be assembled as soon as the cement floor is cured. The floor is scheduled to be poured next weekend and will have a floor drain centered and 3' from the front of the evaporator. The bulk tank will be in a shed beside the wood shed and the outlet is 54" higher than the floor elevation to allow for gravity flow from sap tank to sap pan.

Please don't hesitate to point anything out or ask anything. I am hoping to have everything ready and would love feedback in case I have overlooked or ignored anything.

[maple flats]

While you are in the early stages, consider setting the tank even higher. That way, when you add a hood and pre-heater in the hood you will have good flow which helps keep air bubbles from blocking the flow.
I have my tank 66" above the floor that the evaporator sits on. I have a hood with a preheater in it and the outlet of the pre-heater is 6" higher than the inlet. Even though I built the pre-heater with 4 vents to get rid of air blocks, I've never had to vent them, the extra elevation does the work.

[RileySugarbush]

I agree with the previous comments. Concentrate on making syrup first. We used to bottle as we went, (3-4 of us, so it was possible, but it makes for a lot of confusion as Dave mentioned. And we have burned pans as a result. Someone will ask a question, you turn your back, and poof! We have lot's of guests too, an other source of distraction.

Last year we adopted a new strategy. We eliminated the pre filters and draw off straight into a stainless bucket. As that fills, we pour into food grade 5 gallon buckets. If there is a grade or flavor change, we separate the batches, since we like to have a variety of flavors and don't blend our syrup together. That is an advantage of a small, non commercial operation. The buckets sit sealed up in the cold sugarhouse throughout the season. When it is time to bottle, we decant off the top with a diaphragm pump, leaving most of the sediment behind. Then we heat to filtering temp, run through the filter press into a water jacket bottler, adjust density with distilled water, and bottle.

Doing this separately allows us to enjoy both the evaporating and bottling process, with far fewer disasters!

[minehart gap]

Dave, that can easily be done. Thanks.
Do you have any drawings or photos of your pre-heater and hood? I would love to build one for next year

[maple flats]

Minehart Gap, I do have some pics of my pre-heater and hood. They are on an old cell phone, if I still have it, I'll have to see if it can still take a charge so I can pull them off. In a P.M. send me your email address and I will sent them to you if I can still retrieve them. It may take some time.
I made the preheater using copper manifolds, mine are 1" headers with 6 take offs at 1/2" each, if I ever build another one I'll use the next size larger. Someplace in ebay I found some that were 1.25 headers with 6 take offs of 3/4". I have 4 headers and 2 tiers. Mine enter thru the hood just above the inside gutter that catches the condensation, sap enters there and at the other end of the header I put an all and a coin vent, then I have the 6 long tubes, (mine are only 52" long since my flue pan is 60" long. Then they rise 2" over the length of that tier to header #2. At the far end I have a street elbow, a vent T with a coin vent, at the side opposite where the sap entered. Then header #3 attaches to the vent T and the second tier runs from there to header #4. Sap enters #1 one one side, exits #1 and rises to #2 on the opposite side, enters #3 just above where it rose from #2, and exits thru the hood about 6-7" above where it entered. Thus I have 4 headers at 15" long, and 12 lengths of 1/2" copper of 52" each. in the steam. I have a SS drain pan, slightly larger than the length and width of the preheater which drains into the hood gutter. The end not mentioned on #2 has a cap, all other unmentioned ends of the headers have can ell and a coin vent. My issue is that only get temps up to 170-180 but when the auto draw opens the temp slowly drops to about 110-120. I'm thinking if I had larger tubing for the 52" runs the sap in them would both move slower and have more in volume so I'd get hotter sap coming out of the pre-heater during a draw. Most of my draws with the auto draw seem to be about 2-3 gal each. My concept for entering on one side and exiting at the far corner was to get more uniform distribution, nothing can take a short cut. I'll try to get the pictures.
Dave

[maple flats]

Minehart gap, I looked in my old phone, the picture are gone. I don't see where I loaded then onto the computer. I'll have to get some new pictures. Will try to get them in the next week or 2 and send them to you.

[unc23win]

Not sure who's preheater this is it might be yours Dave? I saved the pictures last season and I was looking at them as I am going to start to build one. How did this one work? Is it worth having 2 layers or what I've heard called a parallel? What size pipe does everyone use?

Thanks Jared

Who's preheater?SAM_0264.jpgSAM_0265.jpgSAM_0266.jpgSAM_0267.jpg

[maple flats]

Yes, that's mine. Thanks, I had lost the originals in my old phone and I was trying to find where I might have had other copies, Jared, you're a life saver. Those pictures are when I had just finished making it. I will try to get pictures of the plumbing to and from. That may be hard to follow, because a picture of the install looks real congested, but everything in the set up has a purpose and it works very well. My only complaint is that I lose temp. during a draw. As the auto draw opens the temp is 170-180F but the draws are between 1.5-4 gal each and after about 2 minutes my temp is down to 110-120. I think if I had gotten 1.25 headers with 6 take-offs of 3/4" each rather than 1" headers and 1/2" take-offs I might have held better temps near the end of a syrup draw. But still, 110-120 after 2 minutes is loads better than the 35-40 the sap leaves the head tank at.

[Paddymountain]

Hey Minehart, I built a preheater for my evaporator since you were here this summer! If you want to see it give a shout!

[Lano75]

We have smoky lake finisher and evaporator. Last year we finally got our process running the way I like it. We draw off check density then pour into finisher through filter set. Once we have around 3-5 gallons in the finisher we reheat and refilter check density and bottle. This works well especially if we land on a Saturday or Sunday. Then we can bottle during the day. We had one week last year where we had sap coming out of our you know where and syrup too! We filled the finisher to the top. That will not happen again. If you have a filter press you will not have to filter twice. We found that with flat filters running through twice is the answer to clear syrup.