One oldtimer rhyme runs, “Wind from the east, sap runs the least. Wind from the west, the sap runs the best.” Our wind (about 5 mph) came from the east, but that’s a pretty lame breeze to matter so much. Here’s a picture of the wind pushing our steam toward the setting sun.

Nevertheless, we’re happy for what we receive, allowing us to finish off our first 55 gallon drum of maple syrup. Now we just need to figure out how to lift it.

The evaporator ran well – one of those days you regret having to shut down because the rig seems to be on a roll, pushing off more steam than seems probable. Here is John stoking the draw-off side while his friend, Addy keeps an eye on the temperature while the maple syrup keeps rolling off. Our stack temperature ran up to 650 degrees, even without the use of softwood.

Speaking of wood, we may or may not have enough this year. We had a truck load of wood delivered some mornings ago. This little pile is really meant for next year, but we’ve started to eye it. Note how some of those sugar maple stems are running sap out of the sapwood, even as they lie cut. I have half a mind to affix a couple buckets on them to see what sort of quantity we could get out of them, especially as they’re visible from the road.

I visited a maple syrup maker across town this morning on my way back from the post office this morning. He has a 42 inch by 12 foot arch, not very different from ours, so I’m stealing ideas from them in terms of how to fire the evaporator.

[The Maple Syrup "choo choo"]

Again, we had neighbors, friends and a few strangers stop by to see what could possibly be generating this much steam. I was told by one that they could see steam coming out of the valley of the West Branch of the Ompompanoosuc from a couple miles south of us. I was tempted to drive over just to see.

[Low pressure weather tends to make steam seem thicker]

[Visitors can't help themselves]

We didn’t make much maple syrup. The wind knocked down the sap flow in the second half of the day. We took in about 600 gallons of new sap, putting most of that sugar into the pans, and not drawing off much – perhaps three gallons of maple syrup. Once this arch starts rollicking along, it’ll be throwing about 10 gallons of maple syrup per hour of maple syrup.

To get that to happen, we need our reverse osmosis machine working, and that’s been a bit of a chore. Ours, you see, is about as old as I am, and a lot crankier. Today it exhibited three distinct personalities, behaving very differently with the same control settings. I think we’re past a plumber, and we need either a psychologist or an exorcist. But it wouldn’t be maple syruping if we weren’t breaking something expensive.

First, though, we tricked a bunch of friends that it would be fun to “take a walk” in the woods. We have very gullible friends, and they found themselves looking for and fixing vacuum leaks. Here is one hapless victim using channel lock pliers to tighten a saddle. Saddles are the plastic pieces that pierce into the mainline and allow the smaller, lateral lines to feed in. They are weak points in the vacuum system.

[Friend "taking walk"]

Meanwhile, in the sugar shack, we conducted the annual “changing of the membrane ceremony,” which involves taking the reverse osmosis membrane out of storage and inserting it into the machine. Since our machine was built before I was born and designed by crazy Quebecois people, we have to lift up the 600 pounds of steel and insert the four-foot-long membrane up the bottom. Here’s a picture of me apparently beating my head against it, which it turns out is easier then lifting it, and a little less painful.

[Head banging on reverse osmosis machine]

Reverse osmosis machines help you concentrate sap before you boil it, saving vast amounts of energy. It works essentially by forcing the sap through a big sock that has very consistently small holes it it. The holes are big enough for water molecules to pass through, but not big enough for sugar molecules to pass. Thus, it forces out a good deal of pure water before you even put it into the evaporator. It’s testy, though; cannot freeze, lest it break; and seems to operate very differently from year to year, as though the mice have gotten inside and change the wiring around just for kicks.

Last year, we got it working, but we found that the directions we got from the previous owner were complete hogwash. The pressure settings they suggested weren’t physically possible. This year, we set it up, and we can’t repeat last year’s settings, but we can come close to what the previous owner suggested. In the next few days, we’ll come up with a few dozen theories on that, but I’m skeptical we’ll ever know why.

I had one of my clever ideas over the summer and installed some large tanks for permeate water (the stuff forced out of the sap) outside the sugar shack to save some room for additional concentrate (the concentrated sap). But we found tonight that the feed pump cannot retrieve that permeate water – something we need for cleaning the RO at the end of the night – because the pump won’t bring up water from a level lower than the pump. This is bad. Tomorrow morning, I’ll be out there replumbing things in an even more complex manner to see if I can use some of our overhead storage for permeate.

The big event of the evening was the christening of the big maple syrup arch with its first flame. It is a beautiful thing. For all the complexity of a big arch and set of pans, everything went perfectly. It boiled smoothly, quickly, evenly. We sat around in wonderment that we hadn’t screwed up a single thing. And, boy, did it boil.

[This isn't boiling; this is BOILING]

The one element of concern with the arch is that we went through quite a bit of wood with this first boil. We will figure out how to fire it more efficiently as we go along, but it’ll be interesting to see if we wind up scrounging for additional fuel before the end of the season. Here is a picture of the firebox opened for a firing on the left-hand side. That opening is about 30 inches wide.

[The gaping maw of "the maple syrup monster"]

[The installation this week of the decidedly low-tech "new" stack]

Very few of them came with directions. The couple manuals that did come with them. turned out to be written in French. Even after translating them, they weren’t very helpful. But that’s sugaring. Part of the fun is the fiddling with the equipment to make it all work together efficiently, causing all sorts of opportunities for arguments and mayhem.

It kept us in the shack more than we should have been and spending less time out in the woods. I’m looking forward to this coming boiling season to get out into the sugarbush a little more often, checking lines and spending less time with wrenches and duct tape.

This past week we had a couple warm days, including a beautiful 40-degree run overnight with mist and rain that must have had the sugar maple trees ready to pop with sap. We and most others were caught out unready to tap (still are), and now it’s cold again. I’m betting on this coming weekend, after Valentine’s Day to tap out. We should be ready by then, even though we still have lots of line work to do.

As far as new technologies we’re introducing in 2009, we have a short list. We’ll have steam hoods this year, which isn’t that big a deal. They came with the used evaporator we bought. This directs the steam out the ports in the roof. We may also introduce automatic draw-off, which is a clever device that senses the temperature of the fluid in the sugar pan and opens up a valve only when it reaches the boiling temperature of maple syrup. This will free up an extra hand in the sugar house, although it does involve a lot of fiddly settings and is yet another thing that could go awry. I broached the topic with the guys, and they all furrowed their brows.

Other than that, our priority has been redoing many of the older lines we use, so that we can get much more sap this year to feed the larger evaporator. We completely re-did our bush in Strafford, expanding it to about 1050 taps, and just this past week started running line to an additional 200 trees here in Thetford, making for a combined total of about 1,600. With good vacuum and a good sap year, this might provide as much as 700 gallons of maple syrup, doubling or tripling our production from last year.

[Burning: cherry. Stack temperature: 750 F. Sound: like a jet]

I took a flashlight to the interface between the stack and the roof, and sure enough, I could see a blue smolder smoke seeping out from where the old shingles touched the wood, now hot with eight hours of boiling. A good bit of mayhem ensued right then. The three or four of us ran about using sap, water, a fire extinguisher, snow and everything else that came to hand to cool both that smoldering area and the stack. We opened the evaporator doors to draw the heat out and threw a piece of plywood over the pans so that nothing would drop in as we were attacking the roof.

Long story short, the sugar shack stood, and I had a long night with a lot of unboiled sap to contemplate what went wrong, and how we’d attack the problem the next morning.

What went wrong was that we’d become much more efficient. The same rig never came close to this heat the prior year, but then we’d added a blower, a homemade preheater and a woodshed that provided drier wood. All of those factors significantly increased the heat under the pans, and also through the stack. We were very, very lucky. My policeman friend Wayne, who grew up just down the road, told me the story of when he’d managed to create the same problem decades ago in his grandfather’s old operation. Pretty much the same cause: homemade roof jack without the right clearance between the hot surface and the combustible roof materials. Without any room for error, any subtle changes, such as the species of wood used to fire the evaporator, can put the temperature at the wood above the point of combustion.

Which brings us to the “new” used rig we just installed in the sugar shack that we’ve come to call affectionately “the monster.” It has a stack that is 16 inches wide, and we intend to throw through that the fires of heck. I asked Robert, who’s been dragooned again into helping with the carpentry, just how far away should wood be from a stuck that has running through it the fires of heck. He said, oh, about 18 inches. Lots of brows furrowed in that cold off-season sugar shack that morning. But Robert had a plan. He was going to box the stack in right from the metal of the roof, cutting away large sections of old shingles and roof boards, adding a cement board set of curtains, following the stack down to the evaporator.

Working up in that roof area above the evaporator is one of the prettiest things about sugaring, and that’s saying a lot. The way the cold hard sun penetrates spaces between the dried out wood of the monitor flaps creates a sliver of light, like a sheet that lights up anything in that very, very narrow layer of space. In sugar season, you see an amazing cross section of steam, whirling and dancing, much like cream does when just added to black coffee in a glass mug. This day we witnessed sawdust dance in a nimbus coming down through the empty hole left from the old stack, as we cut around it creating a properly-sized hole for The Monster. I whipped put my phone to take this pretty low-quality shot when I saw it. Beautiful stuff happens whenever we play with that space.

Robert and Mike carefully cut out a square that was a couple three feet to a side, removing only the wood and shingle and leaving the standing seam roof on top untouched. It was an impressive act of carpenter surgery, and a big sign of how much larger our operation will be this coming sap season. When you can actually fit yourself through your stack, you’re going to make some maple syrup. That, or burn down the sugar shack.

When we start firing up in a few weeks, I’ll be sure to put some temperature probes in various places to ensure that it’s containing the stack heat. One open question is how much to ventilate this little house, so as to reduce its general temperature. Alternately, we might be able to run some piping through there to see if we can do some sap preheating.

It was nice having all the guys back together again working on a common project and poking fun at each other. I think it made us all eager for the proper maple syrup season to begin.

For those who don’t know why we’d be spending so many man-hours putting bricks into our steel arch, it’s because the special fire bricks insulate the outer parts of the rig so that the heat is mostly directed upward, where the maple syrup pans sit, transfering more energy to boiling the sap. Otherwise, the rig would act as a big radiator, using up a lot of that woodfired heat on warming up the sugar shack. Also, the firebrick protects the metal from the most seering of the heat, which prolongs its life.

Here is Robert wacking away at one of the bricks we removed before transporting the used arch. He’s removing the old mortar so they’ll fit nicely when put back in the new setup. You’re supposed to wear goggles when you do this.

Masons will cringe at what I’m about to say. The smoother and neater you put firebrick into an arch, the less turbulence is created in the air as it moves from the firebox, along the underside of the pans and then up the chimney, called a stack. Turbulence is good in this case. It allows more of the flammable gases to burn up and shed their potential heat nearer the maple sugar in the pans above. So here’s a look at the fine job we did “mudding” the bricks up to get some nice friction turbulence running along the sides and bottom. Will it make a difference one way or the other? Almost definitely not, but everything with sugaring has to be accompanied by a theory.

The part accompanied by most theories, though, is the baffles placed under maple syrup pans in order to ensure that the hot gases flow up into the pans corrugations – called flues – before being expelled out the stack. You can see from the picture below that Robert is messing with the first baffle, which is almost all bricked up, with the second one behind it still in metal. The pans sit on top of the side rails, so you can see that these baffles really force the flowing air up into the pan, and into the flue slots.

When boiling, the most vigorous maple sap bubbling action will be where these baffles come up. In this Grimm Lightnening model, the baffles are placed just about where the (cold) sap intake pipe comes into the pan, as well as the place were that sap gets expelled out of that pipe into the pan. I suspect that’s deliberate. Some people put Vermiculite or some other non-moisture-sponging and heat-resistent substance in a layer between the baffles to force the air into the flues the whole length of the pan. We’ll see how our draft is doing once we start boiling to see if we have room to play with such constrictions.

If we find we need more draft to be able to fiddle with such optimizations, we might add more stack height, which draws more air, or start improvising a blower system to introduce high-pressure air into the firebox. Given our natures, the blower is highly likely. Blowers reputedly increase performance by about 15 percent, both in terms of time saved and recovered energy release. The downside: most are very loud. Last year we introduced a cobbled-together blower for the little arch. We used a very quite Vornado fan and some clever ducting. It worked pretty well for the arch, but would be pretty outclassed by the size of this bigger one.

[The 2 x 6 used to get cherry red when we fed it dry cherry]

But yesterday, the salesperson proved truthful, when after upgrading to a larger scale evaporator, I sold the old unit to a nice fellow down in southern New Hampshire. He paid the same amount I’d paid a few years back. Accounting for a little inflation, the time value of money, and all that good stuff, and I figure I got 80 or 90 percent of my money back. Even better still, the market for large evaporators isn’t as brisk, so I was able to put that money toward a full half of the price of the used monster arch I have sitting in my sugar shack.

The transaction reminded me of one of my favorite Ned Perrin’s essays, from when he and a student trekked out to Rutland to see the Grimm showroom and decide on which evaporator to buy. Ned gave himself a headache thinking of the ludicrous price of the new hardware as he paced around the outside of the store before finally succumbing to the purchase. If he’d known that he’d be able to sell that unit for five times its price a few decades later, even after some hard use, he might have saved the aspirin. Ned, who used to live down the road, passed away some years back, but his evaporator still works on, diligently appreciating.

For some unknown reason, sugar maple trees produce much, much more sap and much sweeter sap than other trees do. The sap is the fluid that brings nutrients up to leaves, and sugars and starches back down from the leaves after they’ve done their photosynthesis magic with the sun. On days when it gets to be about 40 degrees Fahrenheit after a night of temperatures about 20 degrees Fahrenheit, sap wells up in sugar maples.

People collect some of that sap by making small holes in the sides of trees and collecting the clear liquid in buckets, or by hooking those holes up to plastic lines leading to a collection tank. As this is done during the spring’s first thaw, often with deep snow on the ground, it’s quite a bit of work.

The sap – which starts off with at about 2 percent sugar – needs to be boiled down to a higher concentration. Sugarers boil sap on a contraption called an evaporator. It consists of an arch – the bottom part that holds the fire – and the pans, the vessels sitting directly on top of the arch that contains the liquid. Through ingenious fiddling, the evaporator came to have all sorts of features and add-on devices that help increase the rate of boiling. Boiling forces water molecules to escape as steam, leaving more and more of the solution’s solids behind. When so much water has been forced out that the solution becomes 67 percent sugar, it can be called maple syrup.

(Feeding the arch, with the pan above)

At that point, the sugarmaker filters the syrup to take out certain types of tasteless solids that come out of solution and make the liquid cloudy. This is done in small operations with wool filters and in larger operations with devices called filter presses that force the fluid through sandwiches of grit between paper filters. Either way, a big sticky mess is pretty much guaranteed.

Once the syrup has been filtered, the sugarmaker grades it, comparing a small sample jar of it up against the light with some standard samples to figure out which category the final product’s color fits into.

(Grading samples. Note the samples for the year across wall.)

At this point, the syrup – while still hot enough to be sterile – might be packed into individual containers, or put up in larger bulk containers, such as barrels. A gallon of finished syrup weighs 11 pounds (the same amount of pure water weighs 8 pounds), so a barrel of syrup is quite a thing to move around. We find it most often requires the use of both hands.

Sugar farms often sell their syrup right from the roadside, or at local fairs and events. The excess gets sold to wholesalers who either pack it into their own branded bottles, or forward the bulk syrup on to food processors, restaurants and other companies that use syrup on an industrial scale.

Syrup is made in Canada and the U.S., with the American production being only about 15 percent of the whole, and that on a good year. Vermonters make about one half of the U.S. production. We here at <a href=”http://www.tillinghastmaple.com”>Tillinghast Maple are responsible for 1/1000^th of that.