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"]

[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.

I knew I’d be upgrading to a larger used rig when we were sitting around a boil in the middle of last season. It was me, the two Roberts and John wondering why our new tricks (a homemade pre-heater, an improvised forced draft unit and a few other things, like dry wood) weren’t bringing our number of gallons boiled per hour much higher than it was the year before. We went from about 12 gallon an hour to just shy of 20 gallons an hour. When you have 800 taps, that’s not a lot of gallons, even with the ancient reverse osmosis machine we’d located and cobbled into some sort of working order. If each tap pushed out a gallon of sap in a day – a typical decent run day – we would be boiling at least 10 hours. Add a couple slow hours when starting up in the afternoon and some cleanup time at the end, and you might find yourself seeing the change of light toward dawn before slogging home.

So, sitting there during the boil with the other boys, I took the cordless phone and dialed up Leader Evaporator, finding their number on the back of a catalog. I spoke to a tired-sounding sales guy who proceeded to tell me that a 3×8 air-tight, wood fired arch with a new suit of their best pans would get to something close to $24,000. I put my hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and whispered the number to the guys. They immediately set to arguing about which piece of information I’d managed to screw up in relating our requirements to the sales rep. I told the fellow I’d stop wasting his time and went back to the boil and to the argument.

From that day on, we knew we’d be looking for an old-time rig that we could rescue. While the year before I’d seen plenty of wood fired evaporators in the classifieds section, suddenly they’d gone missing. With #2 fuel oil passing the $4 mark, people were sidelining oil rigs and snapping up the units coming on the market that used wood. That and the prices of stainless steel might explain a lot why Leader was demanding a starting year’s salary for an evaporator.

This past summer I found myself out in Enfield helping a friend of a friend look at the sugaring equipment that came with a house and garage he’d bought. He had no intent to sugar, but figured he’d ask me what the stuff was worth. It was a 3×10 wood fired Grimm from 1994. Pretty good condition. Raised flues, stainless, although the sugar pan looked like it had gone through some abuse. It came with steam hoods and all the stack pieces someone could possibly use. I’d made a list of prices for him, that I promptly forgot until a few months later, when my search for a used 3×8 unit proved fruitless.

This morning we picked up that unit, after taking a piece of the west wall of the sugarhouse off so that we could fit the new unit inside. After a century of disuse, this old chicken shack is about to burst its seams with both bulky equipment and the buzz of industry. I owe a big one to the Roberts, John and Mike for wasting a Saturday helping me get this monster over state lines. The picture above is of the trailer that had the 600 gallon feed tank and the evaporator behind it, with the back end just poking over the hitch. The rig filled that, the inside of the truck, and two additional pickups.

For those who’ve never done it, moving an evaporator involves knocking out the fire bricks one by one, transporting them, and then lifting the unit onto whatever is going to transport it. In general, it takes about three times as long you think it will.

The picture below shows the big rig in our shack, with Mike bringing in some bricks from the truck. Later, when we put the pans and hoods on the arch, the whole mass of metal reached just five inches below those cross beams on the ceiling. I still have to brick the arch in, but that’ll wait till worse weather this winter, and in the meantime, we’ll try to get the woods work done before the snow builds too high to work the line.

Some highlights:

- A good deal of what we know (which is still pretty incomplete) about how and why sap flows

- Optimal tapping studies, including depth and placement

- Paraformaldehyde pros and (mostly) cons

- Basics of sap collection, including piping and vacuum mechanics

- Sugarbush management

- Forestry elements, such as optimal stocking

- Some very extensive bibliography information on lots of additional research

- A look at learnings about maple tree genetics and reproduction (still pretty rudimentary)

- Costs and economics of sugaring, including analysis of buckets versus lines

- Wood versus oil and gas

- Use of preheaters

- Employing baffles under flue pans

- Alternative evaporator designs, like vapor compression and tubular evaporator pans

- Marketing maple syrup

- Maple syrup grading history and differences between jurisdictions

- Consumer attitudes (perhaps a little dated) on maple syrup

- Review of older container options