My grandpa is bordering on hospice care and is down to eating almost nothing. About the only two things that regularly sound good to him are milk and ice cream. I've been taking him milk from my neighbor's cow and ice cream I make from that milk. Yesterday I made a batch of ice cream using some of my maple syrup as the sweetener. Came out pretty well, but I thought the maple was a little subtle. Took it to him while the kids were watching the game last night, so we'll see what he thinks next time I come by.
This morning I spread some sugar sand on toast for breakfast. I know it's generally considered a waste product, and I try to filter most of mine off when it comes off of the main evaporator before the finish boil, but when a little settles to the bottom of the jar I'm not going to throw it out.
Below is my evaporator in action. I took the barrel stove and cut out where the pan would sit, then welded on sections of T post to reinforce the barrel and provide a better surface for the pan. French G, I won't bother to show you closeups of how amazingly perfect the welds are, so you can just mentally substitute whatever the sexiest welds you've ever seen are. I also ran some fiberglass insulating rope along the rails to try to make a better seal and to further cushion the pan when I'm moving it. The barrel stove has firebrick on the bottom and most of the way up the sides to try to focus as much heat as possible upward, although plenty also gets pushed out the chimney. Once it gets up to temperature it produces essentially no visible smoke.
I have an adjustable duct fan forcing air into a tube in the lower part of the front of the barrel stove which I can use to fine tune the heat pretty effectively.
The warming pan in the back keeps a slight trickle going into the main pan after the boil is developed. The goal is to keep about the same level in the main pan and regularly add to the warming pan as needed.
I have this next to a wood pile, but most of the wood I actually burned was windfall from the yard and woods. Every once in a while I'll throw in a few split logs just to keep things going for a bit longer.
It also went far quicker with the RO prefiltering. In the second picture I'm running the RO straight out of the sap collection barrel and into the warming pan to get the last bits of sap from the day.
The weather has been good for sap flow, but it has been running pretty slow. I'm not sure if that is leftover from a few warmer days or if I screwed up my vacuum lines when I added the new taps.
