I spent all afternoon Saturday and into the evening making syrup. Everything went real good and I ended up with a gallon of the good stuff, 8 pints.
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This is my bottling and filtering station, the kitchen table. Last year I used a mason jar, but these bottles are actually less expensive and easier to pour from. The pot on the right is my filter. I think I paid 20 bucks for the filter, 4 pre-filters, 4 stainless clips to hold the filters, and the nickel plated mesh basket to hold them, that's the long handle sticking out. It was a great investment and did a much better job than the cheesecloth I used last season. These filters can be used over and over for years too.
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The sugar shack was like a sauna at times, but kept most of the rain and snow off me and out of the sap. It held up to 4" of snow overnight....barely.
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I just kept feeding raw sap into the pans from left to right and it got progressively darker and thicker as I went.
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This pan is getting somewhat close to being ready for finishing. If it got too far ahead of the other two pans I'd just add more raw sap directly to it.
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I don't recall if I mentioned it already, but I use this big plate steel to cover the holes as the pans finish. I only have two pans left to finish in this pic. The sheet is big enough to cover the entire top of the evaporator, so I can fire it up with no pans at all and use it for heat or whatever else I like, a grill maybe.
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I wanted to take more pics, but between the splitting of wood, stoking the fire, skimming the pans, adding sap, transferring sap, preventing boil over, and taking the few pics and vids I did, it was a lot of work and fairly fast paced. But, it was a lot of fun, should be doing it again this weekend.
That's pretty much it. Here's three vids showing the evaporator in action, the finishing of the syrup, and the filtering and bottling.
It took 4 hours to boil 27 gallons of sap, another gallon boiled off after I shut it down:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMOazjcdXIw
Then I brought it in on the kitchen stove to finish and filter, a more controlled heat source prevents ruining all your hard work by burning or boiling over the syrup on the fiery woodstove:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxAFNeDQLfk
Once finished I filtered and bottled it. The syrup had cooled to 170 F after filtering so i put it back on the heat to bring it up just under 190F. It has to be over 180 to bottle, but if you reheat it past 190 more sugar sand/ nitre can precipitate out and you will have to re-filter it again:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etYEgt2YRkQ
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