Coffee urn

[mainebackswoodssyrup]

You don't want to use the urn to heat the syrup from cold or room temperature or you are likely to overheat whats in contact with the element and get some niter. We usually go from the finisher through the filter press and into the urn to bottle when we are working in-season. Occasionally, we may have to turn the urn on for a minute or two to keep above 180 but haven't had any niter issues doing that. Urns work good as a bottler but not to heat with. Find another way to heat from cold or room temperature. When we bottle from our 5 gallon jugs in the off-season, we use the finisher which has a valve right on it and bottle directly from that and don't bother with the urn.

[dannyac500]

My plan would be to draw syrup off the evaporator, finish on my gas turkey cooker, pour right into my filtering setup and then pour into the Urn still hot. I guess my intent would be to heat from 150 (or whatever its at after filtering) back up to 185-190 in the urn to bottle. I wouldnt attempt to heat from ambient up to bottling temp.

[Biz]

I only bottle up in batches of about a gallon, I'm sure everyone does it somewhat differently but here's how I do it.

1. Set up filter cones (felt and 2-3 prefilter cones, preferrably dry) onto a rack. I use the cone filter optimizer rack.

2. Put a quart or two of water into the urn, put rack over top of urn, and plug it in until it starts to boil. The steam moistens the filters, and boiling the water gets the urn up to temperature so syrup doesn't cool when it is dumped in. Make sure it is hot just as the syrup is ready.

3. Bring syrup up to temperature and proper density in a stainless steel pot.

4. When syrup is ready, remove from heat, dump out the hot water from urn, set the rack on top, pour finished syrup in. I set the urn in the sink for this. Splashes happen.

5. Bottle syrup immediately. It will be about 190F. If prefilter plugs, pull out the top one and dump into second one. I don't often need to do this when using the optimizer rack, it usually runs through quite well.

6. If bottling in glass, I set the glass on the woodstove before bottling.

Dave

[mainebackswoodssyrup]

You should be OK with that approach Danny as long as the filtering goes good and the syrup doesn't cool too much. We also hang our urn over the evaporator to heat it up some before bottling. Biz's idea works too. If you don't do something you will again lose more heat when it hits the urn, another 10-20 degrees.

[valleyman]

Sounds perfect Biz for my level too.
I'm probably ordering an optimizer soon. Round one works well on the coffee urn?

[Trapper2]

I also do exactly like Biz. I'm usually finishing 5-6 gallons at a time. I may end up using 5-6 prefilters. IMG_5675 (1).jpg.

[antelope76]

I use the same process as Biz also. I usually filter all mine at the end of the season in one effort.

Anywhere from 15-20 gallons. I have 2 felt filters set up with a dozen pre filters in each.

This will be the first time using the optimizer rack. Can't wait to see how it works.

[red/one]

I use the same setup. The only problem I have is I use a synthetic cone filter and several paper filters and the synthetic filter always slows me down.

[wmick]

Tried the Coffee urn bottler yesterday.... Got the Urn on its "keep warm" cycle with water, and quickly replaced it with hot syrup. Preheated pots of cold syrup (which had been filtered off the evaporator) on the stove to about 200 and dumped through cone filters into a pail, which I poured into the urn... but the filtering process seemed to drop the temperature too much and the urn had trouble bringing it back up.
--So I changed it up.... Similar to the previous posts, except I hung the filters right inside the urn. Seems a little unorthodox that my filters were sitting there actually submerged in the hot syrup, but it seemed to work great.. I could pour the hot syrup from the stove directly into the urn/filter and put the lid on, without the cooling effect of pouring from a filter.. It just worked its way through the hot filter as needed, while I filled jars.
Urn.jpg

[ecolbeck]

I disconnected the main heating element on my urn and just use the keep warm element. I set my cone filter on the coffee basket to hold it in place. I added a brewers thermometer to keep track of temp.