So, I am playing a little catch up here with the blog. The Shurflo Vacuum pump and main line did better than we had ever expected! More to follow on that in a later post.
So jump back one weekend ago to Saturday the 28th. We had another good run and since the weather was cooperating we brought the kids down to the tank to help us pump the sap out to the car. As you can see there suited up and ready to go.
After a quick lesson our workers were ready to hook up the collection tank and pump it out. Luckily they had a good teacher watching them. 15 minutes later the tank in the car was full and it was up the drive way to transfer the sap to more manageable buckets.
After getting the sap back to the top of the driveway we started the slow process of emptying the tank into 5 gallon buckets that we could store in the garage and snow banks if needed. with only a 1/2 outlet this tank takes close to 20 minutes to unload. Next season we will swap out the 1/2 fitting for a 3/4” set-up, which should speed up the process a little.
After collecting all week and through to Saturday night we ended up with another 64 gallons of sap that needed to be boiled off. So midday Sunday we fired up the WF Mason 2×3 Hobby Evaporator and made some steam.
As you can see below we started to get a pretty good gradient going with the light colored almost clear sap on the right getting progressively darker to the left. Also in the background we took the previous weeks batch of sweet to syrup using our Bayou Classic Kettle on an outdoor propane burner.
At the end of the day Sunday March 29th we had:
- boiled through 128 gallons of sap
- made approximately 2.5 gallons of syrup
- been left with about 5 gallons of concentrate or sweet
1 comments on “Second Boil of 2015”