MapleAcres

Collected 325 gallons, but the sugar content is low again at 1.5 Brix. Normal is 2 Brix. At 1.5 Brix the sap to syrup ratio is 57:1. The R/O is essential with low sugar. It’s possible sap moved frequently over the winter when we had freeze/thaw cycles so sugar is depleted.

27 over night. Cloudy and cold most of the day. Temperature did reach 35/36 but felt colder. The buckets had a light layer of ice. If it was warmer, it would be a good run. Tree pressure up to 8 PSI.

Into the woods by 2:00 PM to wash tanks and run a rinse cycle on the R/O. Stated collecting by 2:45 PM. Done by 4:30 PM. Back to the farmhouse by 4:45 PM.

Into the woods by 5:00 AM. 27 and foggy overnight. Felt odd. The fog would kind’a freeze on surfaces. Also made everything damp. Had trouble starting the fire under the evaporator because paper and wood were damp from the fog. Took 1 ½ hours to get a good boil.

The day cooking.
5:30 AM start R/O
7:00 AM batch into milk can
7:55 AM batch into milk can
9:15 AM batch into milk can
10:00 AM batch into milk can
10:15 AM R/O finished
10:15 AM 9 ¾” concentrate
11:00 AM 7 ½” concentrate
11:40 AM batch into milk can
12:00 PM 5 ½” concentrate
12:20 PM batch into milk can
1:00 PM 3 ¼” concentrate
1:00 PM batch into milk can
1:50 PM batch into milk can
2:00 PM ½” concentrate
2:20 PM done

Wrapped insulation around the membrane pressure vessel. We had a lot of insulation left from the wash tank. That helped. Also left the tank heater on during the wash cycle rather then using it to warm to 90 then disconnecting. After three hours it reached 113 and turned off as it’s supposed to when warming to 113. We’ll need to monitor temperature during the concentration cycle now because the insulation may retain too much heat while the high pressure pumps runs during the concentration cycle.

By Noon the sun came out. Tree pressure up to 10 PSI and trees dripping. Because of the cold foggy start to the day, not enough to collect. Plan to collect tomorrow.

Back to the farmhouse by 2:30 PM.

Into the woods by 8:00 AM. Put out 64 more taps including the big trees behind the neighbor that runs well. Finished tapping by 10:30, then checked buckets. Moved sap from overflowing buckets to less full buckets so capture the sap until we collected.

Planned to collect at 1:00 PM. Washed storage and collecting tanks. Ran a rinse cycle on the R/O. Connected the propane tank.

Collected 375 gallons. Sap is still 1.5 Brix. Done collecting by 2:00 PM. The centrifugal transfer pump worked well. Emptied the collecting tank in less than 15 minutes.

30 overnight. Partly sunny today. Up to 43. Trees were dripping. We expect they will drip into the evening. We’ll check tomorrow if we need to collect again.

Plan to get into the wood early to cook.

Back to the farmhouse by 3:00 PM.

Light snow overnight and early this morning. 30 overnight. Up to 35, but felt colder. Cloudy most of the day with brief sunshine around Noon. Trees started to drip, but we held off collecting until tomorrow. Forecast is upper 20’s tonight and sunny and upper 30’s tomorrow: sap weather.

R/O wash cycle only reached 109.5 after 15 hours. Insulation didn’t help. The feed pump is moving too much water. The old Grundfos pump was rated at 15 GPM. This Gould pump is rated at 85 GMP we think. We are still investigating all the specifications, but it feels like the water doesn’t stay in contact with the membrane long enough for friction to generate heat.

Into the woods by 9:00 AM. Setup WiFi in the syrup building. We use a Point-to-Point wireless bridge with equipment from TP-Link linking the syrup building the farmhouse Internet connection. They claim it can bridge up to 16 miles. It’s 300 feet between the syrup building and the farmhouse. We get 34 Mbps download and 9 Mpbs upload in the syrup building. The farmhouse Internet is 410 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload so we lose bandwidth, but it’s better than tethering our cell phone to the laptop. We can satisfactorily watch YouTube videos. And even video conferencing should work.

We got the idea from this article. Point-to-point Wi-Fi bridging between buildings—the cheap and easy way https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/point-to-point-wi-fi-bridging-between-buildings-the-cheap-and-easy-way/

Back to the farmhouse by 12:30 PM.

We got a 2018 Ford F150 this afternoon.

Into the woods by 5:00 AM. Back to the farmhouse by 7:30 PM. We were determined to boil the sap we collected yesterday. Setup is a lot of work. We hoped to be prepared this season by taking a week in February to get ready. Mother Nature had other plans.

Cooking syrup on February 1st is unusual, but in the woods it looks and feels like mid-March with the melting snow and sun. This isn’t a January thaw of only a few days.

Setup and configured the R/O. Added insulation and a cover to the wash tank in hopes of solving last years problem with not reaching 113 during wash cycle. That took 1 ½ hours. We’ll see if it helps. It’s the type of insulation used with hot water heaters. The R/O manufacturer claims heat lost from the wash tank causes the low temperature.

Started the fire under the evaporator by 11:00 AM, but didn’t get to focused cooking until 1:00 PM when the R/O was ready and running. R/O finished by 5:00 PM. Went 6 Brix to 7 Brix.

It takes several hours to get finished syrup when starting from raw sap or concentrate. Two batches into the milk can. Batches were ready by 5:50 PM and 7:00 PM. The syrup looks good but may not be Golden/Delicate like last season.

The fast centrifugal transfer pump is repaired. A small pebble was lodged in the impeller.

Still some issues with the new R/O feed pump. It won’t reach 25 PSI during the concentrate flush cycle. It’s a short cycle meant to capture concentrate in the R/O before washing. We’ll loose some concentrate by omitting this cycle, but we don’t think it will hurt the membrane. Overall we’re still skeptical this new feed pump is suitable for our R/O. We have a single 4” membrane. That pump may be more suitable for R/Os with 8” membranes and multiple membranes.

Puddles were frozen overnight, but the air temperature was 34. Mostly sunny and 45 during the day. Forecast for upper 20’s tonight and next night. Trees dripped some, but we need a good freeze again.

We accomplished the goal of cooking the sap, but it was a long day.

The 101 buckets from Monday were full. The 200 taps from yesterday were less. But we still collected 310 gallons. If we had been fully tapped to catch all of the run that started on Monday, we would have had over 600 gallons. But the sap is only 1.5 Brix.

Into the woods by 7:30 AM. Got a tank of water for the R/O. Before using it, we have to rinse the membranes with 200 gallons of plain water. The collecting tank is in use now with 85 gallons of sap. If we hadn’t got the water first, we would have been out of luck getting water.

Washed the storage tanks. Started connecting the pipes. Brought the R/O into the woods. We’ll setup the R/O tomorrow.

Started collecting at 2:45 PM. Done by 4:30 PM. Tried to use our fast centrifugal pump but it wouldn’t turn over. It’s been three seasons since we last used it. Should have tested it. Most likely it needs cleaning.

It feels like mid-March in the woods. Didn’t freeze over night. Up to 43 today. Started cloudy but the sun appeared by Noon. The run is over. We need a freezing night again to prime the next run. Freezing nights are forecast for the coming days.

Back to the house by 4:45 PM.

Into the woods by 7:30 AM. Fueled the tractor. Loaded up buckets and covers and headed out to tap. Switched to the 5/16” spouts. They are better for the tree because of the smaller 7/16” hole. However, they are plastic and aging causing some to break. Since they are plastic we can drill them out if necessary. Got 200 more buckets up. We do batches of 50 buckets at a time. Helps keep track of our count. Takes about 1 ½ hour for a batch of 50. Hoping for 100 more this week yet.

We’ll need to collect tomorrow. The 100 buckets from yesterday are over half full. And still dripping. Sap running on the new taps today too. Pressure still at 5 PSI. Cloudy and up to 40 today. Snow showers forecast overnight, but no accumulation.

We have a pedometer application on our phone now. Adding the number of steps taken during the day to the Season @ A Glance. We do a lot of walking during tapping and collecting. But we estimate the greatest number of steps during days we cook. There’s a lot of walking to check on things and firing. Anticipating 2.5 to 3 miles for each hour cooking. Curious to see how close we come to that estimate. One mile is about 2000 steps.

Tomorrow morning we have to prepare for collecting. The first task is a tank of water for the R/O. We use the wagon and 225 gallon collecting tank to fetch the water so we need to do that first before collecting otherwise that equipment will be engaged.

Back the farmhouse by 4:00 PM

It’s January 29th and we are tapping. The earliest ever for us. It was 48 on Christmas. We had two weeks of Winter between January 9th and 23rd. Snow storm with 12”-14” of snow and blowing. Then below zero for 6 days. But it started warming by January 25. We have the freeze/thaw cycle now. And that cycle is forecast to continue for the next 10 days. The trees don’t know about the calendar: they follow the weather. Even if we get a cold snap in February, it will just pause the sap. The weather pattern is here now.

This was already an El Nino year which causes warmer air to push farther North mitigating the cold air pushing down from the Artic. But temperatures have been much warmer then El Nino alone. It’s climate change. We’ve been 10-15 degrees warmer then normal. The river didn’t freeze until the below zero days in January, but it will melt again.

We put the pressure gauge on a tree this morning along with a bucket and spout. No tree pressure or sap at 9:00 AM. But the sun came out and by 12:30 PM the tree was at 14 PSI and the spout dripping fast. It tested at 2 Brix. So we prepared to tap.

Into the woods by 1:00 PM. 100 taps up by 4:45 PM. Planning for 400 this season.

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.