I Thought it was over on Thursday when my sap buyers ended taking in any more sap. Still, my trees still yielded 325 gallons on Friday. I concentrated it up to 16% (about 29 gallons) and put it in freezer storage for now. Today they were on another run since it froze again last night. I stopped with the vacuum early this afternoon. There is nowhere to go with the sap, so I returned 130 gallons to the forest. I have the evaporator acid cleaned to a shine. I’m not going to fire it up for a small cook.
I am now making plans to build a “miniature outdoor wood fired mobile evaporator”. It will have many conveniences. These include an automatic level float valve and automatic finish pan feed & draw valves. It will also have a digital controller. The entire unit will run on a 12-volt battery. It will be used for finishing up at the end of the season, demonstrations and small batch syrup cooking. It will be handy for things like making 29 gallons of 16% concentrated sap into about 5.4 gallons of syrup…anywhere!
So… this season… 12,840 gallons total, on about 850 taps, a new record!
Billion Drops Sugarbush 