Sweetening the pan.

At the beginning of each season, whole bunch of sap needs to be put into the beast before a trickle of syrup comes out the other end.  April first and I have yet to charge the system.  I did a boil on Tuesday.  The evaporator gladly chewed through 160 gallons and asked for more.  I did a pseudo measure, the cylinder was not tall enough for the hydrometer, and am faced with a brix at draw-off shy of 20% sugar.  My best interpolation is that 50 odd more need to go in before syrup is derived. 

There was a run on Thursday and Friday.  At noon I had perhaps 65 gallons to transfer over to the processing room before the white stuff commenced.  For some reason this afternoon at 3 PM, despite it being barely 33 F, overcast and still spitting snow after dumping 13" of wet stuff, the end of the line is pouring out as steady as I have seen it since finishing the 100 taps for this year and watching fish food come out.  Is this the big push at the end of the sap run that the trees mythically go through to hasten bud break?  The grizzled old goat down the road, that in his youth tapped trees on the front portion of the property, told me that the largest volumes are had when the ground is bare and the frost completely gone.  "That is when the roots really move water."

If I can manage to shunt the flow before the sap turns from the next phase of bud development, I will get some finished syrup off the shiny new apparatus of tax abatement.  Then, I will have to use a 7 gallon stainless brew pot, sourced from a beer making supply house, to draw off 5 gallons of concentrate at time and reduce on a propane burner.  My best guess is that the both the flue and syrup pans contain 70 gallons of concentrate.  A few hours on the Interwebs and I am now comfortable in speculating that the flue pan, once sweetened, will contain a concentrate just shy of 20% sugar.  Reduced, that might result in 13 gallons of finished syrup.

Chickens

Counting

Hatch?

What ever comes off, it is going to be dark.  Fine by me.  That is what has the most flavor.  Best guess is that Tuesday would be the next day for enough stored sap to be available for fire number two and an answer to how it will taste.