Into the woods at 6:45 AM. Even with the syrup pan washed and ready it still took an hour to prepare for cooking. The storage tank pipes were frozen and needed the heat gun to thaw out. The pipe into the evaporator was also frozen at the outlet valve into the evaporator. It was 9:00 AM before we could commence production firing.<\/p>\n
R\/O from 7:45 AM to 1:15 PM. 6 Brix. Doing a soap wash to see if we can get back to 7 Brix.<\/p>\n
From the first batch we had nitre on the bottom of syrup pan. Lots of nitre. Typically we get a nitre buildup by the end of the day and don’t have nitre most of the boiling day. Nitre disrupts the boiling causing very fine, golden bubbles. It will boil over if not watched and stirred. Stirring helps dissipate the heat. This boiling pattern slows down the overall cooking time: we can not fire as hard and have to have deeper sap levels in the evaporator. We still managed to finishing firing by 5:15 PM. 440 gallons processed. Five batches into the milk can. The batches were a little bigger so there was more than an hour between them. But still filled the milk can. Back to the farmhouse by 5:45 PM.<\/p>\n
18 overnight again. Sunny all day but the temperature barely got above freezing. The sun was warm and sap is likely moving in the trees. By 3:00 PM there was some slow dripping. By 5:45 PM it was 28 already so that stopped any dripping.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Into the woods at 6:45 AM. Even with the syrup pan washed and ready it still took an hour to prepare for cooking. The storage tank pipes were frozen and needed the heat gun to thaw out. The pipe into the evaporator was also frozen at the outlet valve into the evaporator. It was 9:00 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-season-101"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=569"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":803,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions\/803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}