This might not be real interesting, but it is informative. I had my daughter take some pics at the sugar bush tonight when they went to unload sap...
Lots of neighbors take their sap to this sugar bush. Here we are backed up to the stainless tanks that will allow us to measure our sap. As it is unloaded, we also take a sample of the sap, which will be sent through a little machine that reads the sugar content.
The white PVC transfers the sap to the tank. At the end of the PVC is a sock that filters crud out of the sap as it gets dumped.
Here is the little reader that tells us the sugar content of the sap. This tells the sweetness. Much of the sap this year reads a 30:1 sugar content, so for every 30 gallons of sap, you will get 1 gallon of syrup.
This is Merlin's evaporator. First, he runs the sap through a reverse osmosis machine and removes a good share of the water, then he cooks it down and stores it in barrels. It's a sticky job.
This is where the sap comes out of the evaporator. It's really hot!! This is set up to automatically draw off the sap as it reaches the right time.
That is Merlin. He looses a lot of sleep this time of year. But sticky, sweet, and loosing sleep, it's a great job!
Thanks for sharing. It's fun to see how differnt sapping operations work. My grandparents had a trough in the woods with a wood fire to boil it down and then when it gor to a certain point it went up to the house, to an outside kitchen-back room to cooked down further. Only once did Grma cook it down in the house, she said she had sap runnning down the walls--you live and learn!
ReplyDeleteYep. I would imagine some of you out there would remember cooking sap over a fire in the woods. Our horses didn't need to cook it...they just started drinking the sap from the pails and once they had the taste, you couldn't stop them!
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