Off flavored syrup

[Russell Lampron]

And nasty looking sap can sometimes make good syrup! We've had sap we could barely get filtered through a cone filter coming off the wagon and required frequent changes to the RO pre-filter that came back a full colour class and tasted great!

My first experience with that was years ago when my former son in law, the self proclaimed maple expert, told me dump some yellowed and cloudy sap. It was my sap and my decision so I boiled it anyway. The color went up from grade B to Dark Amber and the flavor was excellent. I don't dump sap without boiling some first.

[Maple Time]

I think I figured out the problem with my bad batch. Last night I took about a gallon off the front pan and took it in the house to finish on the stove. There was no bad smell while boiling inside and it tasted good too. Sap is fine so I looked at my next step in the process, filtering. On the bad batch I had used this filter for the first time this season(cone filter used last year). After the test batch went through the same filter the bad flavor was back. So I guess this filter wasn't 100% clean or dry after last year or some how picked up something in storage.