This is my official first batch of the 2019 season. 1.25 gallons of bottled grade A early season light. I decided to try a suggestion this year and bottle a few days after making it. This way I’m not tired and rushing trying to bottle while it is still hot. Instead, I just reheat it using an electric tea kettle. I set the temperature for 185 degrees and it is then at the perfect temperature where by I can just take my time and bottle it. Worked great!
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I’m running my newly converted and membrane updated reverse osmosis as we speak! I put out 50 buckets this year! I’m quickly leaning that 50 might have been a mistake. That’s about 10 too many for me to go get and gather. The RO takes that much longer, etc, etc. I see from last year’s log the season started 10 days earlier. It’s much colder this season. Heck, it just snowed today. With my 50 taps I received 40 to 45 gallons of sap the first warm and and another 25 gallons of sap the next. While waiting on new filters for my RO, all my sap froze solid. Yeah,…
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Sometimes it seems you can’t win for trying. Isn’t that how the saying goes? I recently entered my maple syrup into a local fair as I detailed in a prior post. The results are in! Third Place. I suppose that’s not horrible out of all the entries that were there, but I was docked points because it wasn’t a “full pint”. Figures. I was specifically told that for competitions you put them in a honey jar. Well, that’s what I did. Apparently that’s only for the Quart Competition where they use the Beeline #2 Honey Jar. The pint rules are a little loose, but they need to be…
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So last year many of you will remember that I got big into Maple Syrup. What you may not know is that I tried my hand at it the year prior also (Spring of 2017) and made roughly a gallon of syrup using only a stock pot and single burner. It was hard, I had very little idea on what I was doing (Let’s just boil down this sugary water… Easy right?), I’m pretty sure I didn’t know what filtering was, nor bottling properly. Despite all of this, I was determined to enter it in my local fair, and enter I did! Disqualified? On taste? Well now, I thought…
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So I just came across a statistic in the maple syrup world that I was not only unaware of, but a number that I’m sure I didn’t make anywhere close to getting. A modern day sugar maker will aim for 1/2 gallon of maple syrup per tap. It was in this months “Maple News” paper when someone talked about expanding their operation and an experienced sugar maker asked why he was expanding when he hadn’t fully obtained full production out of what he had. Apparently the old rule of thumb for a sugarbush was to get 1/4 gallon of syrup per tap. Now with today’s more modern methods, we should…
