[The Not-Very-Quaint Extractor]

Buckets and horses it ain’t. It’s a clever device, and useful in that you can calculate your sap flow by timing how frequently it extracts with its electric pump.

Tonight, visiting our rented sugar bush to see if I needed to turn off the vacuum system due to rapidly freezing conditions, I set down to first calculate the extracting times with a stopwatch.

I didn’t set this bush up. A man named Chaz did, and I came along to rent it from his family after he passed away a few years ago.

[The Sugarhouse at Chaz's Bush]

Our extractor throws about four gallons of sap at a time, so when we see it working every three minutes, we know that we’re running about 80 gallons per hour out of the forest, or about enough to make two gallons of maple syrup. The pump clicks on after 2 minutes, 56 seconds.

Just one test is often misleading, so I reset the watch to restart. Killing time, I start going through the trove of Chaz’s notes from years past. Manuals, sugar line layouts, some day-to-day notes. The notes are precious. They show how this bush’s trees interact with weather and temperature, seasons and how Chaz’s equipment – much of which I use – interacts with the sap to create light and dark maple syrup. He’s written down settings, mistakes, clever work-arounds and even occasionally how he felt.

3 minutes, 9 seconds later, I hear the extractor click the pump on. I could use another data point.

My sugaring buddy and I have been arguing back and forth about whether the season is over, or if we’re just in a dry patch for sap. I start rifling through Chaz’s notes to see when he stopped. He ended his seasons on April 14, 2, 21 and once on March 23, although the notes then indicate “burned the finish pan,” so I won’t count that one.

I hear the extractor pump turn on, so I push the lap button on the stopwatch. 3 minutes, 37 seconds that time, slowing a little.

Some of his notes are prosaic things only another maple syrup maker would find interesting, like the sugar content of his sap (high then as it is now, at about 2.5 percent), and others barely describe the drama I’m sure was involved (”March 20: Leak in flue pan”) which was probably very much like the day, almost exactly a year later, “9.5 inches of sap. Burned front pan.”

The extractor clicks on, and I push the lap button on the stopwatch. 4 minutes, 1 second this time.

In 2003, when Chaz was sick, there are blank spaces. You can see him backfilling dates with temperatures, and once writing on March 24 “Was in hospital since the 21rst.”

I didn’t see a lot of syrup quantity recorded day-to-day in that calendar. He’d put out a gallon of maple syrup one day, a few days later three gallons of maple syrup. The inconsistent boiling took a toll on the grade, with the maple syrup descending to Grade C on March 25. Chaz did a “push” the next day, putting plain water through the back of the pan to push through the remaining maple syrup before he would dump the pans, clean them and start over.

I notice the extractor has been going for a few seconds, so I reset the stopwatch. It was 4 minutes, 30 seconds. A whole lot slower now.

It took three days of boiling after that to get the sugar content back up in the pans, and the first batch of maple syrup must have been frustrating because it was Grade C again. It would have come back up after that, but the weather let Chaz down, turning cold enough to deny him sap for nine straight days, and allowing the sap he did have in his pans to sour. He cleaned again the day before the big runs on April 10 and 11, making a range of Dark Amber, B and then C again.

Those days and the three next brought Chaz 36 gallons of maple syrup, by far the most he’d ever made in such a period. The next day: “Very warm. I quit.” It was 76 degrees outside, a clear day and a night of a full moon.

5 minutes and 20 seconds had gone by. The extractor clicked on. I pocketed the timer and grabbed Chaz’s notes. There was truly a trove of useful information (that, for instance, the automatic draw off device I was contemplating using actually doesn’t work).

[Before Chaz, the Old Sugarhouse Up Atop the Hill]

I peer into the extractor’s input pane and can see that the sap lines must be freezing up. There’s little sap coming in, and the pressure gauge is steadily climbing as ice blocks major parts of the lines. I throw the switch on the wall with a satisfying “clunk,” turning off the vacuum. With some cold this evening, we’ll get some more flow tomorrow, and maybe extend our season one or two more days. It’s April 8, a full moon lights the outside; a fair time to think about stopping for those who would, but I going to decline. I still hold out hope for a last charge of sap in the face of the oncoming spring. We still have much to make up.

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.

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