Into the woods at 6:45 AM. Washed the syrup pan. Then got the R/O running. Had to get reacquainted with it since we didn’t use it last season. It had a squeak we didn’t recognize, but cleared after a few minutes. No leaks. Took the sap to 7 Brix. Took about 3 hours to process 285 gallons. That’s 90 gallons per hour. We should get 100-115 gallons per hour. Not sure why it wasn’t processing more per hour.
The evaporator is very sweet now. It took about 45 minutes between batches. At the end of the day we processed a final batch in 30 minutes.
This syrup looks lighter. We used a separate milk can so we can bottle some lighter syrup.
The day cooking.
7:45 R/O starts
10:00 batch
10:50 batch
11:00 R/O finishes
11:00 5.5” of concentrate
11:45 batch
12:00 3.0” of concentrate
12:20 batch
12:50 batch
1:00 done
We calculated it would take 15 hours to cook old school. We finished in 6 hours using the R/O. Glad we put into service.
34 overnight, although puddles had a slight layer of ice. Cloudy and 42 today. 2” of snow forecast overnight. Plan to collect tomorrow. The trees were still slowly dripping with some buckets ½ full.
Back to the farmhouse by 1:00 PM.