My second batch this year ended up having a crazy amount of niter sand in it. I did two batches this year that were one week apart and boiled almost identically. In the picture, the first batch is on the left and the second batch is on the right. You can see almost the same color, but very different results in terms of niter. My boiling process is using an outdoor wood fired boil until I can fit the batch in my 16 quart pot and finish inside on the stove. I filter (using a cone filter with 2 pre filters) when I do the transfer from the wood stove to the kitchen stove and then once again before bottling. I used a hydrometer to find the finishing point, waited for the temp to drop to 185 before I filter a second time. After the 2nd filter, the syrup went straight into jars that were sterilized and pre-heated in the oven. Exact same process for both batches except I did not use a hydrometer on the first batch. This is the same process I have been using for 3 years and I've never had niter sand issues. Usually I only see a small trace of it, if any, at the bottom of my jars... This 2nd batch is something like 15-20% niter sand! This 2nd batch was my first time using a hydrometer and you can see from the pic with the thermometer that I reached around 222-224 as my finishing temp. The sap used for batch two was less than a week old and was stored buried in snow banks, so the sap should have been fine. The sap was also around 2.4% based on my sap hydrometer. What did I do wrong?
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