2023 was a remarkable season. We had the best quality and highest yield we ever recall. We made three milk cans of Grade A Golden, Delicate Taste syrup. The rest of the crop was just over the Golden standard at the higher end of the Grade A, Rich Taste scale. No dark syrup. We didn’t do anything different for processing, so mother nature had her own reasons for the quality. Before March, we had an open winter with little snow. We had good weather patterns for sap in March, but nothing exceptional so weather patterns don’t explain the better quality either.
The yield of 2 pints per tap was exceptional. We could have made more syrup, but once the Brix dropped to 1 or below it’s a lot of processing for a few gallons of syrup. The R/O makes it possible to cook, because we can get 5 or 6 Brix before cooking, but it’s still a lot of processing. It was unsettling to dump full buckets of sap like we did on March 28, but the sap was 1 Brix or below. While we tapped the end of February, sap likely flowed much of February due to favorable weather patterns. So by the end of March the sugar the trees had stored was depleted even through there was water available to make sap: with less sugar available, the sap had lower Brix. We can mitigate that by tapping earlier.
The R/O was a problem again this season. The impeller on the feed pump breaking was unfortunate, but once we saw the impeller was plastic, breaking was inevitable because bark or other matter does get into the sap and will damage the impeller. While the new feed pump it all stainless steel and tougher, it feeds a larger volume of sap into the R/O causing temperature problems during the wash cycle because the larger volume of water passes through before friction heats it. We’ll see La Pierre, the R/O manufacturer, in October at the NAMSC annual meeting in MA and ask about how to mitigate the heat loss during the wash cycle. We’ll likely need to try an insulation wrap around the wash tank and a cover. The wash tank is open to the air and could radiate a lot of heat.
Hopefully only more more season on buckets. Planning for upgrades to a vacuum system and new evaporator by 2025.