Thanks

Making the filters hot with water is very useful (especially if you use hot sap from the evaporator, which doesn’t dilute things quite as much) when using a filter press. The correct terminology for filter presses, by the way, is “damned filter press,” but “filter press” will do as an abbreviation. The filter press is a device that forces maple syrup through a series of plates that alternately have paper filters and often a white power substance called filter aid or diatomaceous earth. Those paper filters tend to break when pressure builds up from too much sugar sand building up or the maple syrup lacking enough heat to run quickly through the machine. That’s why preheating the filter with hot liquid can allow you to get much more maple syrup through the filter press.

[The Damned Filter Press]

Now, with a gravity filter system, such as the one you’re using, where you just let the maple syrup run through a cloth, there does not seem to be any benefit from pre-wetting the filter. It sounds to me like your problem is that you are using a cloth that is too coarse to filter much of the sugar sand. Cheese cloth is only good at filtering out the very largest of chunks. In order to get your maple syrup at all clear, you’re going to have to use either a wool filter or one made of a synthetic wool, such as Orlon.

We use cloth diapers as a first filter, drawing it through the diaper right off the arch. We tried cheese cloth, but it was simply too course a filter to take much out of the solution. As a final filtration step, we use the filter press to polish the maple syrup, taking out pretty much all the very fine particulate matter left in the maple syrup. By using the course filter of the diaper first and by pre-heating the filter press, we get much more maple syrup through the filter press before having to break it down, clean it and then set it up again.

I do not recommend that folks with small operations get a filter press. They are argumentative, balky, stubborn, capricious machines with personalities akin to the staff at your local DMV. People buy them because they’ve grown in maple syrup production past the point where gravity filters can keep up with the maple syrup produced. I miss those days when our trusty gravity filter kept up with our arch.

[We are not rapping]

Our water pipes froze underground over the winter, so we called up our local plumber, Dave Hauger. Rumor had it that he’d home-made a special device that would snake down a water pipe, emitting hot water along the way to melt the barrier. He arrived and set up what we quickly called the “Hauger Auger” and set to work.

[Dave and his "Hauger Auger," along with Bone behind him conducting a maple syrup prayer]

Meanwhile, up in the woods, Ellie sought out, and found, vacuum leaks in the Hubbard Hill bush. She took these shots, the one above being a nice shot of the east face of Hubbard Hill, which very clearly wants to grow maple. The one below is of the tracks of a little critter sidling up to a pole-size sugar maple and then attempting to girdle it by eating the bark around the base. This is one of the two main reasons it’s tough to regenerate sugar maple in these woods, the others being the profusion of whitetail deer.

Tonight, we boil.

[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.

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.