Eastern Ontario 2022

[ennismaple]

If your into ropy syrup I don’t think it’s gonna get any better at this time in the year.
In my opinion ropy syrup is a mixture of both the temperatures and the tree putting out buds.
I’m sure there’s a more scientific explanation to it. But I would just pull your taps and call it a season.
Last Tuesday was our last sap day and called it a year. Once the sap gets a bit cloudy we don’t risk it.
Waste of time if you spend all that time boiling it and it comes out a snotty sour mess.

We've had our flue pan go ropey on us a few times - normally towards the end of the season and after its sat for a few days with just the right sugar content in the pan. My flue pan today was looking like it wanted to go ropey and the float box definitely was ropey. I drained the float box and drew off some concentrate from the valve closest to where it was starting to get a little thick. Once new concentrate was coming in I just had to watch the defoamer for 10 minutes or so and then it settled back down. It ended up being very good syrup and filtered fine.

Managed to push another 94 gallons of very dark to dark syrup today and with the hard freeze coming tomorrow night we'll likely get one more good boil on Tuesday before calling it quits.

Galena - nice to see you on Saturday and glad I could give you a bit of a tour. If you'd been there today you might have learned some new words... "someone" didn't check the concentrate levels going through the RO and created high-test concentrate that ran off so fast I couldn't filter it fast enough and had to stop firing for an hour to catch up on the filtering!

[Galena]

Galena - nice to see you on Saturday and glad I could give you a bit of a tour. If you'd been there today you might have learned some new words... "someone" didn't check the concentrate levels going through the RO and created high-test concentrate that ran off so fast I couldn't filter it fast enough and had to stop firing for an hour to catch up on the filtering!

Haha, don't think I would have been offended by the new words, probably heard and used em all before...and I'd've been glad to take some of that uber-concentrate off your hands ;-)

[paulslund]

We've had our flue pan go ropey on us a few times - normally towards the end of the season and after its sat for a few days with just the right sugar content in the pan. My flue pan today was looking like it wanted to go ropey and the float box definitely was ropey. I drained the float box and drew off some concentrate from the valve closest to where it was starting to get a little thick. Once new concentrate was coming in I just had to watch the defoamer for 10 minutes or so and then it settled back down. It ended up being very good syrup and filtered fine.

Managed to push another 94 gallons of very dark to dark syrup today and with the hard freeze coming tomorrow night we'll likely get one more good boil on Tuesday before calling it quits.

Galena - nice to see you on Saturday and glad I could give you a bit of a tour. If you'd been there today you might have learned some new words... "someone" didn't check the concentrate levels going through the RO and created high-test concentrate that ran off so fast I couldn't filter it fast enough and had to stop firing for an hour to catch up on the filtering!

Was that "someone" you by chance?

(In my case the only person I can blame if something goes wrong is myself.. ).

[paulslund]

We've had our flue pan go ropey on us a few times - normally towards the end of the season and after its sat for a few days with just the right sugar content in the pan. My flue pan today was looking like it wanted to go ropey and the float box definitely was ropey. I drained the float box and drew off some concentrate from the valve closest to where it was starting to get a little thick. Once new concentrate was coming in I just had to watch the defoamer for 10 minutes or so and then it settled back down. It ended up being very good syrup and filtered fine.

Now that's interesting.. I couldn't tell it was ropey until it was done.. during the boil everything looked, tasted and ran off the ladle in a normal manner. And it's actually the lightest batch I've made all season!

[DrTimPerkins]

And it's actually the lightest batch I've made all season!

It isn't real uncommon to get really light syrup late in the season. Sap is normally a bit acidic, but as it spoils it turns more acidic. During boiling, sap goes through an "alkaline degradation" phase, where the pH rises sharply, then drops off. It is during this time (high pH, alkaline) that niter forms and there are lots of chemical reactions that form flavor and color. So if the sap starts out quite acidic, it may never or just barely reach an alkaline pH. If this happens, less color and flavor are made (very light-colored syrup), less niter forms...all seems really good...except that the syrup may taste sour.

[paulslund]

It isn't real uncommon to get really light syrup late in the season. Sap is normally a bit acidic, but as it spoils it turns more acidic. During boiling, sap goes through an "alkaline degradation" phase, where the pH rises sharply, then drops off. It is during this time (high pH, alkaline) that niter forms and there are lots of chemical reactions that form flavor and color. So if the sap starts out quite acidic, it may never or just barely reach an alkaline pH. If this happens, less color and flavor are made (very light-colored syrup), less niter forms...all seems really good...except that the syrup may taste sour.

Come to think of it, there was a lot less nitre than my other batches.. I had attributed that to being my smallest/shortest boil, but I think proportionately there was less.

Now this question may appear blasphemous, but would physically altering the PH with, say, baking soda, offset the impact of what you described? I'm sure this would be considered an additive, so it's more an academic question than anything...

I think I read that someone studied how to reduce ropey-ness, or maybe it was buddy flavour..(can't remember at the moment) by continuously adding distilled water in order to pro-long the boil.. I'll have to try and find that.. if the effect was to reduce ropey-ness I may try it on a small batch later this year.. just for fun!

[DrTimPerkins]

1. Yes, modifying the pH would both affect the outcome and be illegal.

2. There have been some suggestions on ways to reprocess ropy syrup. We're looking into it but aren't ready to endorse anything as yet.

[Galena]

Reworking ropey syrup...hmmm seems like tilting at windmills to me. I'll just stick with my parlour trick of *making* a small batch of syrup from my collection of syrup-laden nitre, saved for visitors who've never seen syrup made before. Chuck it in a pot with about a gallon of distilled water, boil as per usual, filter and eh wala I can get around 500ml of reclaimed syrup from nitre :-)

Very happy with my end of season total of 18.5l. Averages out to around 34:1 seasonwide which is low for me, usually I'm about 28:-26:1 this time of year. But then the red was on the line helping out.

[ennismaple]

Was that "someone" you by chance?

Yeah nobody to blame except the guy staring back at me from the mirror! I adjusted the RO concentrate flow a bit and didn't give the system enough time to settle down before sampling what went into the tank. It tested 2 Brix lower than I wanted so I cranked it down again. When I tested the tank later it was 20 brix - which I've discovered the hard way we cannot filter fast enough!

[DrTimPerkins]

In my opinion ropy syrup is a mixture of both the temperatures and the tree putting out buds.
I’m sure there’s a more scientific explanation to it.

Turns out there is. It is a spoilage microbe (same one that spoils milk) that causes ropy. It is pretty much always there, but when it is warm it can proliferate. It has nothing to do with the buds on the trees, except that they both tend to happen when it warms up. Best thing to do to avoid (ropy) it is to process your sap quickly, maybe aerate the sap or ultrafilter (jury still out on those), and fire up your pans every couple of days when it is warm to knock them back until you boil again.

We had a terrible time with ropy last year. Hot weather and lots of low and slow flow days. Sap was coming out of the lines really loaded with microbes, so by the time we could get it through the RO and into the refrigerated bulk tank it was already too late. Ruined about 25-35% of our crop. Our worst production year since 2004...even counting 2012.

A few places are doing some research on possible uses of ropy syrup...turning it into alcohol or something else useful. If it isn't too bad there is a process that "might" be able to salvage it, but again, not enough info yet.