17 overnight. Sunny and 27 today but the wind made it colder. Cold tonight again. And cold tomorrow. Rain/snow Tuesday through Thursday.
Into the woods by 8:30 AM to prepare for finishing and bottling. Brought the milk can of syrup to the farmhouse last night so it wouldn’t freeze. Brought over water and the pans and all equipment needed for bottling. First bottling of the season so our equipment wasn’t in the building yet. Syrup on by 9:30 AM. Syrup was closer to finished then anticipated. By 10:00 AM we were over density and had to cut back with icy sap from the evaporator. Filtering by 10:30 AM. Bottling by 11:00 AM.
We had a special order for a wedding of 192 50 ml maple leaf bottles. They take a long time to do because its a lot of handling. Bottles fill quickly so you have to watch carefully and then move on to the next bottle. Takes 20 seconds per bottle. Took 1 ½ hours for all 192 bottles. 192 bottles @50 ml is 2.1 gallons of syrup.
Tired to regulate the temperature between 190 and 200. Our temperature checks indicated we were successful, but by the end we had cloudy syrup. Syrup looked good in the 50 ml bottles but the larger 250 ml and quart bottles weren’t to our standard so we put back into the milk can to finish and filter in the next batch.
After clean up, back to the farmhouse by 1:30 PM.