End of Year Syrup pan Sweet

[Ms Ellis]

Thank you

Ms Ellis

[Bricklayer]

I drain my flu pan of all sweet into 5 gallon stainless milk pails.
Then fill it with permeate and fill head tank with permeate.
I set the stainless milk pails in the back pan with a spacer under them to keep water on the pans and around the pail. This keep them hot and kinda acts like a preheater.
As I’m boiling I just ladle sweet into the syrup pan at the inlet to keep the levels good. When the light goes off on the auto draw I grab a pails and slowly pour the sweet into the syrup pan at the inlet and chase the syrup out.
Works good. Have to pay attention though.
I got an extra 8-9 gallons this year chasing sweet. So it was well worth it.
Last year we tried making maple vinegar with the sweet.
It worked. But not as tasty as you would think.

[Swingpure]

Forgive my ignorance, I understand this conversation is about if you have a front and a back pan, but if you just have a single large divided pan, is the concept the same at the end of the year, that you add water instead of sap and push the gradient along?

[DrTimPerkins]

Boil it down in the pan without any sap or water addiction until the volume is low enough to put it all in a small pot you can finish on the stove or a Turkey fryer.

[SeanD]

Thanks for the responses. I run wood so it's challenging to do a final syrup pan boil since I can't shut and cool down quickly.
Ken

Challenging, but only first time or two you do it. It doesn't take much of a fire to just have the front pan boiling. Use smaller wood as you get closer to the end and the heat is much easier to control. This season end, I stopped the finishing boil a little too soon. I had the mindset of a typical shut down where my volume drops by half after I flood the pans - but since it was such a small fire, it didn't evaporate that much more after I put the last of the sweet in. It was still really light and I was very low on propane for the finisher, so I just relit a fire and fired it 2 or three times. That cut the volume way down and got me about a point heavy.

The end result of that boil was 8 gallons of delicious 30% Tc. I can't imagine selling that for $20. It's definitely worth the extra effort to try to get the last of your syrup off your pan.

[jrgagne99]

On my little rig, I take it down as low as I can using small pieces of softwood (easy to control fire that way), then drain everything out and finish it over propane. Takes a couple hours to finish it, but worth it for the 3-4 gallons of extra syrup. I also sometimes do this mid-season to recover about 25% LT, especially if there is a long freeze at that time.