Maple sugaring

[cordex]

I sterilize the jars and lids in boiling water, and after I put the hot syrup in I turn them upside down for a while. That was the process recommended to me, but I’m not an expert and it is possible it is wrong in some respect.

[cordex]

With the rising temperatures, I was worried the run might be nearly over. It wasn’t today, anyway. I had at least 15 gallons of sap in the barrel from today, and combined with the condensed sap from yesterday ended up with 10 gallons of concentrate.

Another couple days like this and I’ll have a real good boil.

[cordex]

I'm up to 20 gallons of concentrate, which is all I can store in the upright fridge and freezer in my garage.  I think at this point I'm just going to freeze buckets (hoping they don't break) and swap them out.  Hopefully it will be cool enough that they will take their time thawing.  Going to be a heck of a boil this weekend.

[cordex]

Almost through with the first boil on this batch. 23 gallons of concentrated sap, so at least twice that in raw sap before the reverse osmosis.

My neighbor called on his way back from the shop and let me know he had some left over bread and milk that he needed to get rid of, so I got three loaves of really good homemade bread. The cheddar jalapeño wasn’t as spicy as it could have been, but still very good.

Might try making cheese with some of the milk.

[Northwoods]

What sugar content do you get from the RO? Do you do multiple passes?

[cordex]

What sugar content do you get from the RO? Do you do multiple passes?

I put the permeate line in a bucket and the concentrate line back into the barrel that has the sap, then let it run. So multiple passes but continuously instead of as a batch. 

Concentration depends on how long I leave it, but usually at about 5% the permeate slows to a trickle and then I move the concentrate line into a clean bucket.

[cordex]

Did the finish boil tonight. Ended up with almost a gallon.

[cordex]

Last night my oldest daughter helped me boil down another batch. We got a late start but I had been voluntold help with some work today, so we made due.

We got another half gallon out of this batch. It sounds like a lot, but we have been giving it away like crazy, so it isn’t piling up the way I’d like.

Weather looks to be pretty warm this week. I’m guessing sap season is going to be done soon.

I learned a lot this year that will hopefully make next year even more productive.

[cordex]

I got the first trees tapped for this year. Right now I’ve got the pump running at 100% duty cycle on an EcoFlow Delta 2 that is also plugged in to a long extension cord. 

I built a second pump box with another EcoFlow battery and have a 400 watt panel to plug into it. The downside is that I don’t have a great place to put the solar panel that it won’t be shaded, so that one might need to be regularly swapped with the other one.  There is one fitting I will be getting today to finish out that build and then will tap another stand of trees.

[Northwoods]

Nice.  When kids sports are no longer sucking all my time (5-6 more years) I plan on tapping my big leaf maples.  IIRC the sap from them is 2/3 or so the sugar concentration of more eastern sugar maples.

I also have quite a few birch trees.  I've heard they're good for syrup too, but have even lower sugar levels, so it takes a lot more energy to make the syrup.

[cordex]

If I were tapping low-sugar varietals I would definitely go with an RO solution of some sort. I use one with my maple sap but it would be even more important with big leaf or birch.

[Northwoods]

If I were tapping low-sugar varietals I would definitely go with an RO solution of some sort. I use one with my maple sap but it would be even more important with big leaf or birch.

Yeah, I've read enough to know about RO.  You can basically just keep running the sap through them until you hit the limits of how much they can concentrate the sugars.  Then you have to go to some means of boiling the sap down.  Had i started sugaring 10 years ago I would have just used wood fire for heat. These days I want what wood I have for my wood stove, so I don't have to start buying truck loads of logs for a while. I used to sell half a dozen cords a year just from cleaning up the property.

[cordex]

This year I’m going to heat my sap before ROing it. I think I should be pushing 8% but I’m topping out at 5-6% with cold input. I have an immersion heater on the way to speed that up.

[cordex]

The first 14 taps produced between 10 and 15 gallons of sap since I installed them today.

It is cold enough that I may let a few days go between ROing the barrels into buckets and freezing the concentrate.

Tomorrow I will rebuild my RO system and install another 7 or 10 taps with the new pump box.

[Northwoods]

Next fall i might hit you up if it looks like Thing 2 is able to assist with sugaring.

[cordex]

I’m far from an expert, but I’d be happy to talk through what I do know.

If you think you are going to be interested and don’t have the stainless fabbing expertise of French, this is a heck of a value for an evaporating pan:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0DJX6G1KL

[Northwoods]

I’m far from an expert, but I’d be happy to talk through what I do know.

If you think you are going to be interested and don’t have the stainless fabbing expertise of French, this is a heck of a value for an evaporating pan:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0DJX6G1KL

Thing 2 is in welding classes. He's already gotten a start on Tig. 

[cordex]

Thing 2 is in welding classes. He's already gotten a start on Tig.

Very cool!  You can go nuts with the pan design then and justify it as practice.

Before you spec out your pan, figure out your arch.  I use a converted barrel stove, but many people build arches out of block and firebrick.  Once you know your necessary pan dimensions (I have 18x34x6 and 18x24x6 pans), you can pick out additional features like a warming box to let cold sap warm up and feed through to the main pan without killing the boil, position for the draw-off tap, dividers to cause the sap to increase in sugar content as it winds around to the draw off tap (better for continuous runs as opposed to batch runs), vanes that stick into the fire to collect heat, etc.

You can always start with a basic wide, shallow pan and add features later, though.

[cordex]

I’m up to 18 gallons of concentrate banked. That is not including the 15 gallons of unconcentrated sap in the barrel at the pump box from today. It is cold enough I can leave it all outside, which is good because my shop freezer is dying or dead. It is looking pretty good for the rest of this week and I should be good to boil this weekend. I haven’t checked sugar levels, but at a guess I should have enough sap for a gallon to a gallon and a half of syrup already. Weather looks a little cold tomorrow but good the rest of the week, so I may do okay for my first boil.

I still haven’t installed my second pump box. If I do it this weekend I will only get a day or two of run before we get several days of hard freeze, so I might string up the lines but hold off tapping until after the freeze breaks.

My rebuilt RO is a two stage with an inline 5 micron filter, a 400GPD membrane, and a 100GPD membrane. I don’t think I have the second stage figured out quite yet because I’m not getting much pure water out of it - almost everything is coming ofrom the first.  I’m not too worried because it runs pretty well even cold and my immersion heater hasn’t even arrived yet.

My 4 year old makes it a point to come with me to check on the sap every chance he gets. We fill up a little cup with clear, cold sap for him to drink.

[cordex]

Windy and cold, with mud under the snow. Sitting by the hot barrel stove doing my first boil. The smell of the steaming sap is amazing.

I ended up installing the second pump box yesterday since the kids were home sick. I doubt I pulled more than a few gallons of sap before things froze up today. With the forecast of a solid freeze and single digits, I think I’m going to have the pumps off for a week or so.

Everything is covered in snow (including most of my firewood), I have duckboards down so I don’t sink in the mud, but it is still a hell of a lot of fun.

[cordex]

My daughter convinced me to crack open the sap barrel. I had about 20 gallons last night, but it has 30 gallons now. Way more than I anticipated and not as frozen as I feared. I’ve started ROing straight into the prewarmer. Still have half a bucket of concentrate not yet in the boiler, plus whatever I get out of the 30 gallons from the main sap barrel and maybe 5 from the new sap barrel.

I’ve been using some maple and oak cut offs from the treehouse build earlier in the year as well as some sassafras I had split. Plus some compressed wood bricks from pallets as an experiment (they work, but not as good as hardwood, obviously).

[cordex]

I have never heated sap prior to feeding through the RO, but that has to become SOP going forward.  Previously my concentrate was about 4.5-5% after several passes.  I was able to get 6.3% consistently on my first pass with preheated sap and it was flowing pure water like crazy.  Once the hard freeze passes, I'm going to see what kind of concentration I can reasonably achieve with preheating.  I was previously hoping for 8% but after doing some reading I think I might be able to get to 12-16%.

For comparison, 100 gallons of 2% sugar content sap could RO down to 44.4 gallons of 4.5% concentrate which is where I could easily get without much work.  If I can get that to 14%, that's a mere 14.3 gallons of concentrate.  That would be an insane reduction in the amount of boiling I have to do. 

Yesterday I spent 9 or 10 hours outside boiling down 35 gallons of sap (passed through RO at between 4.5 at first and 6.3% after the immersion heater arrived) and 18 gallons of 5% concentrate.  Once it hit 50% sugar content I came inside to finish boil it.  If I had reduced all that down to 14% concentrate I'd have only had to boil a little less than 11 gallons, which is a couple of hours on my evaporator.

Final yield was something like 1.75 gallons, plus a big pan of maple candy.  I think I was awful close to 2 gallons.

Filtering went well and there appears to be very little sediment in the final product, although I'm really wishing I built a vacuum filter so it can go faster and lose less syrup in the filter.  That'll need to be a project for next year.

The immersion heater was also handy for converting my pure water to hot water for washing stuff.

[Northwoods]

Is the water potable?

[cordex]

Is the water potable?

The RO water?  Sure.  Unless you let it spoil, sap is potable directly.  RO purifies it further.

[cordex]

I turned the pumps back on early yesterday but they hadn’t gathered much at all by last night.

Went out after work today and I had 10 gallons in one barrel and 35 in the other. I noticed that the hard freeze last week pushed many of the taps partially out, so I went back through and reseated them.

I’m running the big barrel through pre-heated RO now. So far I’ve extracted 6.5ish gallons of pure water from it. Before I go to bed I’ll pump the concentrate into buckets and get them cooling.