Like Matchsticks

As it is, I spent some time up in our main bush today, cleaning lines and making sure things look pretty for the seasonal neighbor who comes in August. This is how I discovered that a couple weeks ago there must have been an enormous wind event. I found about 20 or 30 big maples twisted up and toppled in a fairly small area. The trees were pushed over, pivoting on uprooted root balls in a northeasterly direction, which is odd. These trees are sheltered from northeasterlies from Cooks Hill behind them. These are precisely the trees I would have expected would be protected from winds from that direction.

Root Balls Came Right Over

It’s pretty much a mess that’ll take something close to a man-week to clear out – not what your expecting wife wants to hear at T-minus 30. I’ll be taking a trip up there with the big Jonsered saw tomorrow, perhaps make a dent in it.

Last year we managed to burn about a dozen cord of wood in the process of making 520 gallons of maple syrup. We’ll have a total between 30 and 40 cord by the time we’re done. Might be enough for two years, then again, maybe we’ll get some folks sending us some additional sap.

I’ll be heading up to Vershire tomorrow morning to pick up some old tin roofing a friend is setting aside as he takes down a falling farmhouse on his woodlot. Will be sure to stock him up with a good amount of maple syrup. This tin will go atop the split and stacked wood. It’s just about the best thing to help dry it out. The wood starts off about 40 percent water when it’s split. By the time it’s dry enough for my tastes, it’s gone down to between 15 and 17 percent water – about as low as wood can go in Vermont’s outdoor air. We had a doohickey with long prongs you could stick in the end of a log to tell its moisture level. It was sitting out until a friend’s twin boys came by and started to try to test each other’s moisture levels. Turns out they’re both about 85 percent water incidentally, which makes sense, as they’re twins.

In retrospect, the number of gallons of maple syrup we made last year relative to the wood we burned indicates that our pre-concentration of the sap isn’t as strong as I’d like it to be. Suggests we’re concentrating the maple sugar in that fluid only between 2 and 3 times. We’d much rather see between 5 and 6 times concentration, as that’s where we’ve been able to show consistently that the flavor remains the same after going through our reverse osmosis machine. Just for the sake of argument, if we did concentrate by 6x, then the wood we have on hand could make more than 4,000 gallons of maple syrup, if you could find the sap. That gets the mind going.

[Just Earth]

More odd looking was the moonscape we created last night, taking the hardwood coals out of the evaporator after we shut down. We’d run out of sap, and it was going to be a rather close thing as to whether the latent heat in the evaporator, including the coals, would have continued to boil down that sap to maple syrup and then beyond and eventually burn the pans up. To be safe, we took out about two trash can loads of white-hot coals and put them in our remaining snow pile. Someone said it looked like a moonscape; another said it looked like a lava flow.

I don’t like to waste heat and wood like that, but I’d been deliberately cutting it close, trying to draw off some maple syrup one more time before we shut down. As it was, we just missed it, with the sap in the sugar pan not quite making it to the density we like. That super-concentrated sap we held over sure made a lot of maple syrup the next day. We drew off seven and a half gallons of honest syrup within the first five minutes of firing up that arch. Our biggest draw yet.

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.

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.

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