New Batch Rollin

    

 Susie and Ace were down for a spell.  Harold brought Taylor and her two friends out to see the process and sip some sap.  Also got to catch up with Mart, who's back home from three weeks on little corn island.  


  Professional maple syrup producers use expensive continuous process evaporators.  Besides being expensive, these require a LOT of sap to operate. This is not practical for the average hobbiest.  Most of the guys in this area use a batch process instead.  Batch evaporation is nothing more than putting a big pan on a heat source and boiling it down.    I use a 15 gallon stainless steel steam table pans, that I got in a trade for a gallon of honey. 
 When you start evaporating, you will be adding fresh sap as the boiling progresses.  If the added sap is cold, it stops the boiling process, and really slows down the process.  So I use two pans to pre-heat the fresh sap, which is then added to the primary boiling pan once hot.  Actually, if you have enough heat on the pre-heating pan, you can do a considerable amount of the evaporation in the pre-heating pan, which really speeds things up, because as the primary pan gets more and more concentrated, the evaporation slows down considerably, so it helps to reduce the volume of sap as much as possible before it goes into the primary evaporator pan
Know when to say when:
    When you make maple syrup, it is very important to boil the sap down to the proper concentration.  If you boil it too much, the syrup will crystallize on cooling, which I'm sad to say I did with last weekends batch.  The crystallization will continue past the point of ideal syrup so you end up with big sugar crystals covered by a watery liquid, which is not ideal.  If you don't boil it down enough, the syrup will not be concentrated enough, which will permit bacteria to grow in the syrup, and it won't last as long.  So, I plan on keeping an eye on this batch. 
The temp. never got much over freezing, from a low of 17* this am. to 20* at 10 pm. 
Tonight the walk down to the bush provided a brilliant sky show with Venus and Jupiter snuggling up to the crescent moon.  
Mary and Clayton stopped by for some tea and to catch up as we finished off this batch.  It's looking much better, no crystals.  Bacon, eggs and fried tators for lunch.