We can see the light at the end of the tunnel. This is despite the fact that we just got another 32 gallons of sap tonight to add to our supply currently buried in the snow. If we get 11 more gallons of sap, which would bring us to 540 gallons of sap collected, between tonight & this weekend we will have collected three times as much sap using the new Shurflo Pump set-up than last year!
So this time we took our 2nd batch of syrup plus any remaining sweet we had laying around and brought it to finished syrup. As you can tell from all the spilt syrup on the plate we had a little bit of work to get the syrup to the right density!
We ended up having to thin out the syrup with some distilled water because we were running a little heavy. Once everything tested out to the correct density after correcting for temperature we loaded the pot with 3 cups of DE and cycled the syrup/DE mixture through Daryl Sheet’s Filter press to charge the filter papers with DE. After cycling the syrup through a couple times, we pulled the outlet tube from the syrup pot and stuck it into the finishing bowl.
Below is a quick shot of the bowl that the filtered syrup ends up in. The Stainless steel cooking bowl just happens to fit nicely on one of the Wife’s cooking pots that we use as a double boiler.
After filtering the syrup the stainless steel bowl fits perfectly on a pot full of boiling water. We have found that it is easier to control the temperature of the syrup as you get to a canning temperature of between 185F and 190F.
When the syrup is at canning temperature we load it into our maple only coffee/bottling urn that we use to fill the bottles.
Our bottling professional fills every bottle of syrup carefully!
Recapping our 3rd round of bottling we made (37) 8 ounce bottles and (10) 4 ounce bottles, which works out to 2.625 gallons on syrup. This batch is somewhere in between the medium amber and dark amber we have made so far. This puts us at around 6.5625 gallons of syrup for the season with one more boil Friday Night and Saturday Morning. Hopefully we can get a little Grade B syrup, and pull the taps and call this season a wrap!
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