2018 Spring Harvest

[Dill]

I just blame the time change for everything that goes wrong this time of year.

[Amber Gold]

Agreed. I hate daylight savings...stupid. Particularly since it happens during maple season...that last thing I need.

[sapman28]

Agreed also.

[BAP]

Agreed. I hate daylight savings...stupid. Particularly since it happens during maple season...that last thing I need.

Yes it stinks to get in rhythm and time changes.

[Russell Lampron]

Russ, I don't think I want to build a bubbler for the syrup pan, so if I'm not using much defoamer in the back pan because of the bubbler, do you know how it'll affect syrup pan foaming?

I've always ran the bubblers in both pans and don't know if the front pan will foam up without it. I'll have to shut the front one off to see what will happen.

[Amber Gold]

Thanks Russ.

I went into yesterday thinking it was going to be an epic, all nighter boil, but such is not the case, and in the end, it's a good thing because I was able to get to bed. Fortunately, RSS pump line froze and they couldn't get all the sap out of the woods, which made it easy for me to justify holding over the load I hauled out to today. This also allowed me to take a 200 gal load off Jim D's hands today. All in all, the 3000 gal I thought I was processing yesterday turned into about 1700 gal and I'm figuring at least 1400 gal tonight. I thought things were going to freeze up early last night, but I don't think it got below freezing until midnight or so. I may have another decent load out of my woods that I wasn't counting on.

Got the syrup pans swapped out and had to resweeten the syrup pan. Yesterday's burnt pan still had good syrup in it, but it needs to be boiled down more. I'm also making almost an Amber, so I didn't want to use the "burnt" syrup with the light syrup. For now, it's set aside in a pail. I made a keg, plus 14 gal (so close to filling another keg), and sweetened the pans. Good night overall.

Not sure what's changed, but last night, syrup temps were at 217.5. I've always drawn off at 219.5. Curious as to what it'll be tonight.

[Amber Gold]

Also talked to Jim about my waaay heavy syrup, and he said the barometric pressure was very low Wednesday night...explains why the syrup came off so heavy. First time I've experience the air pressure making that much of a difference.

Burnt/nitered syrup pan with permeate water flowing through it from the RO drain and a metal spatula means very little work to make a pan look new again.

[Russell Lampron]

SapTapApps will tell you what the draw off temp will be at the time that you are boiling. You can get it at saptapapps.com and you can use it to log your sap collection times and amount of sap you gathered. You can have more than one sugar bush which is handy for guys like you that get sap from other people. It keeps a running total of how much sap you got for the season and how much sap per tap per run. It uses data from weather underground to make sap flow predictions too. I've got it on my tablet and phone and have been having some fun with it.

It froze up around 9:00 here last night and it looks like i won't get another run until Tuesday. Surprisingly I had 650 to boil last night and made 12 more gallons of Amber. Unlike you I want my color to go the other way. It would be nice to make some dark for maple Weekend but I don't think that it will happen.

[Amber Gold]

Woah...you just opened a whole new world to me Russ...I had no idea this existed. I need to check this out!

It's pretty cool how little changes in so many things affects maple...production, temps, weather, grade etc.

[Russell Lampron]

Woah...you just opened a whole new world to me Russ...I had no idea this existed. I need to check this out!

It's pretty cool how little changes in so many things affects maple...production, temps, weather, grade etc.

Another thing that I forgot to tell you about the app is that it tells you what temp to draw off syrup at when you are boiling. Pretty sweet huh! Ooops I just reread it and that was the first thing that I told you about it. (Too many boiling soda's already!)