Checking what VT sugar makers are doing

[blissville maples]

Pretty quiet on here! Not too many regulars posting updates anymore.

Had a big boil yesterday about 9500 gallons of sap ended up with around 190-200 gals of amber Rich still. We may have touched on dark Amber for a few barrels but nothing dark robust. God I hate this new system there is no way to accurately represent dark Amber without kicking it into the b category which there's nothing robust about Dark amber. It's amber...just slightly darker!!! I guess color is more important than flavor, until the last barrel is made then it's like oh my God that's end of season syrup. Yeah? Well color is there, oh but that didn't matter with my barrel of dark Amber you graded dark robust!!

[DrTimPerkins]

Pretty quiet on here! Not too many regulars posting updates anymore.

Yeah...sorry. I've been a bit remiss in posting updates. Only working part-time these days.

Nice run overnight. About 1.6 gal/tap, running 2.3 and 2.1 Brix in our two different sections (has been a tad above what is normal for us). Sap-wise we're at about 60% of a "minimum" crop for us (20 gal/tap of sap). Syrup-wise we're a bit behind at only about 27% of a "minimum" crop (0.5 gal/tap syrup), but we've got over 1,000 gal of 33 Brix concentrate chilling in the bulk tanks and about 8,000 gal of sap in the storage tanks and silo to process. The Lapierre HyperBrix is running and concentrating to 37.3 Brix right now and the crew is boiling today, so that'll help us catch up a bit. Mostly a nice amber/rich, which is what typically makes up most of our crop. Doesn't take much boiling time to make syrup when you start at 33 Brix.

Our vacuum is a bit lower than we'd like. That real cold snap a week or so ago seems to have loosened up some of the spouts on the larger trees. Hopefully they'll get that squared away soon.

Looks like it'll keep running most of tonite too. Good stretch of sugaring weather forecast over the next 10 days or so.

[Andy VT]

Blissville, I'm a little confused about your grade angst... hasn't it always been by color, and hasn't it always been the same 4 colors? We just have changed some names? This is a genuine question... I'm a long time Vermont syrup consumer, very short time "producer".

[tcross]

my woods hasn't really produced much yet. we've had some real cold weather up here the past 3-4 weeks and the trees don't want to wake up. yesterday was our best run of the season... a little bit less than 1/2 a gallon of sap per tap. good news is the sugar content was 2.5 which is very good for us! typically happy to see it get to 2%. i've done a lot of thinning over the past 5-6 years so perhaps i'm starting to see the benefits of that? last night was our 4 boil and i'm sitting at 1/10th of the crop i'd like to get! So, hopefully the trees open up soon and we can salvage a good season. Baring some real warm weather, we should still have 2-3 weeks of good sugaring season left... i hope.

[Ultimatetreehugger]

Tcross are you around Lyndonville area? My woods is doing the same but I check my raw and the first 3600 gallons came in at 3%! I have CDL techs who can substantiate my story! This woods has never run above 1.9 before. The snow is definitely limiting my runs.

[Mooneybc]

In the last 24 hour run I had 1.7gal/tap of sap but the sugar content was actually lower (1.6%) then what I’m seeing from other folks and what I had last week. Hoping this week continues on with the good runs we’ve had the last two days in NW VT.

[tcross]

ultimatetreehugger... i'm in Derby. We're still sitting on 2-3 feet of snow in the woods. yesterdays rain started melting the snow away from the base of the trees so i'm hoping some good runs are coming. It trickled in all night last night. my 400 trees gave me 170 gallons of sap yesterday. 30 degrees here now... not supposed to get above 34 today.

[drewlamb]

What's the proper amount of airspace to leave in the top of a barrel? Is there a standard? We use rigid 15 gal kegs and regular 40 gal drums. I shoot for around 1/2" of space at the top but am sometimes slightly over or under.

[blissville maples]

Blissville, I'm a little confused about your grade angst... hasn't it always been by color, and hasn't it always been the same 4 colors? We just have changed some names? This is a genuine question... I'm a long time Vermont syrup consumer, very short time "producer".

It has always been by color but not the same colors.

It used to be light, amber, dark Amber, b and commercial (without looking at old sales slips from Bascom)

Now it's golden, amber, very dark and commercial.

The problem is that Amber has a wide array of flavors in colors more so than any other grade. When you take a syrup down to bascom's and it has a rich flavor nothing robust whatsoever and simply because it is one slight shade darker than Amber they grade it as very dark. Very dark syrup has a robust taste a dark Amber does not have a robust taste however a dark Amber does not make the Amber grade. With the old grading system that Amber syrup would have never been put into the dark category.

There's a huge difference between light Amber which is not golden and dark amber which is not dark robust. They're both Amber syrups just on either end of the spectrum and I don't think it's fair to bump them one way or the other

[blissville maples]

What's the proper amount of airspace to leave in the top of a barrel? Is there a standard? We use rigid 15 gal kegs and regular 40 gal drums. I shoot for around 1/2" of space at the top but am sometimes slightly over or under.

Get as much in there as you can because it'll shrink down once it cools I prop my barrels up on a rock so that the bong is the high point they seal much better