Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Property Projects & Construction Making Maple Syrup

Wow, technology is awesome!

azteca, I just clicked on your link. The forum discussion came up in French. I started scrolling to see if any replies were in English, when suddenly my screen flashed and everything switched over to English.

The translations DID NOT appear clumsy to me. Somehow the forum determined that I was English speaking (by location inference, or by determining my OS was English?), and flipped to apparently well done machine translations!

Do you know if that forum is French only (in the original), or in Quebec do you encounter lots of dual-language online publications?

Hello.

I transfer the site to Google and I transfer it to P.B.
A+

Ha! I reckon running a tubing system must be akin to a tree catheter?

We pulled all our spiles yesterday. Still need to finish off the last of the sweet and sanitize the lines. It was a good season for us, added two new flavors of infused syrup and tried our hand at making maple sugar. Feeling content.

Tony, how big is the sugar shack now?

The building is 24 x 48, but aside from firewood storage we only
Use half the space. So I suppose the sugar house is 24x 24.

Wow Sparkplug! How did your sap run so much earlier than ours?
We had 60 degrees on Sunday and the sap was really running, but then cold front came through and snow overnight so everything stopped. We really had only 2 days of collection and have about 75 gallons of sap waiting to boil. I'm surprised you are finished with your sap run already?

We have a new divided pan with prepan above so hoping we can be more efficient with keeping the boiling going by preheating above it. A little bigger surface area to try to cut down on how many hours we have to tend a fire outside!

Great to hear you are making custom flavors too!

Hello.

I am a hobbyist.

What about boiling maple sap with a hot water tank heater?

They put the tank heater directly in the maple sap.
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Tony is a bit further South than you are. The Amish around here have pulled their collection systems already - the Maple trees have started to bud and the sap turns bitter. I'm 30 miles South of the Michigan border, he's another 150 miles South of me (as the crow flies).

Tony was it a good season? 2 weeks or so of collecting?

Canyon, it was a good season. We tapped our trees back on the 8th of January, had our first boil a few days after that. Without venturing down a slippery slope, the truth is our winters are changing here.. it's getting warmer, sooner, generally speaking. Accordingly, we have adopted the strategy of tapping early and running a longer season. Having tubing and check valve spiles (taps) helps ensure that we keep our tap holes as sanitary as possible, leading to them staying open longer than what is possible when they are exposed to the air, such as what happens with bucket collection systems. We got almost 8 weeks this season, and we're thrilled with that. Its a crap shoot.... tap too early and miss the big Spring runs, or wait for the big runs and lose it all due to an early Spring.... that's farming for you.

I don't know enough to say if a heating element in the sap would work or not. Certain it would get hot and boil, but would be concerned that sugar would coalesce on the element and burn?

Tony, I think you are correct about the sugar coalescing. Only way it wouldn't would be if you could keep a current in the sap, constantly moving cooler sap around the heating element.