At three pm yesterday we finally got 10 16 liter buckets worth of sap into the evaporator pan to start boiling for Maple Syrup. No chance at a tan as the sun was dipping into the tree tops when it finally got started for real. We’ve waited all week for this, but unfortunately we can’t stick around to help now that it has actually started. Too bad. It was the whole reason we came over here in the first place. But with multiple days of rain ahead, no point running an outdoor evaporator. Can’t outpace potential torrential downpours. You’d add needless hours to your boiling with the incursion of rain water into the boiling pan. Not to mention trying to keep the fuel dry enough to burn without having to erect tents, lean tos or tarps which would inevitably trap smoke too. Shame really. This is one of my favourite times of tear to stir up ice chunks, boil sap, cart wood around, split logs, and be outdoors with no bugs & limited sun exposure. Maybe next year we will be more organized.
But know this, if I’m running the program for you we are running the sap deep, and the fires as an inferno! Hot & deep. Helps to freeze off water from the sap buckets over night before you start. A reverse osmosis machine can also knock a number of hours off of your boiling time too, by separating out the sap from much of the water. Less fuel used, and shorter boiling times equals better business practices.
When you think about how it takes forty liters of sap to give you one liter of syrup you can get a sense of just how long it can take to boil all that down to a useable syrup. And we started with 160 liters of sap as an opener for starting the fire, and prepping the evaporator pan. It’s not a small operation here, but we are by no means large. If we were smart we’d vacuum pull the sap directly from the trees, via tubing lines, and strain it, filter it, drain it into a giant holding tank that the bobcat could maneuver around, and just open a tap to flow across a much larger evaporator pan, that was wound with copper wire to heat up water for washing & cleaning our set-up while we were at it. But I digress. Not my show. Also a partially sheltered concrete pad to work off of, and storage bins for fuel near by would be a plus. Pressurised warm/hot water would help for late stage clean ups wouldn’t hurt either. I’m too pragmatic for my own good.
I’d also build a wider evaporator pan, with a longer drainage spigot, and some metal filters that I could slide in, pull out when draining the pan. Wider doors for shoveling in the fuel, and cleaning out the ash/charcoal afterwards too. But I tend towards day dreaming alot, so what do I know. Have a nice weekend at the tail end of March Break. Ciao Bella!
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