We planned to put it up at the end of the summer, when we first finished the new maple syrup barn, but of course, stuff intervened. We wound up heaving this 600-gallon monster steel tank up into the maple syrup storage loft only after the first snows had come, making it all the harder and heavier. The opening up there was built with this tank in mind (as well as bringing up 55 gallon drums of maple syrup), but that didn’t stop me and Robert from arguing whether it would or wouldn’t actually fit when the moment came. In the end it did, but not with much in the way of room for error.

Robert and I heaved it up onto its small side and lifted it over our heads to the point where the boys could grasp it from above. Problem was, they couldn’t quite reach down all the way to the tank, even standing on its side, so one had to hold the other out the window a bit to grab a hold. It was not a pleasant site to see when standing below the tank pushing upward with all one’s might.

Somehow they managed, man-handling the tank to stick straight out so as to fit inside. Heard lots of grunting and scuffling up in there. While transfixed by this, stairing up at the rising tank, it occured to me that standing 16 feet below this precarious situation wasn’t too clever. Had it fallen on my head, I probably would have dented it. So I stepped aside and took these photos while they walked the tank all the way into the barn’s second floor.

This tank will hold the sap coming down from Hubbard Hill, our smaller bush with 550 trees. We have a new vacuum (or new to us at least) to set up, and that’ll keep us in plumbing for a few weeks to come. On the other side of the loft, we store the large barrels of finished bulk and wholesale maple syrup.

In particular, we bolted on an I-beam just under the ridge beam, allowing a wheeled trolley to slide back and forth with very heavy loads. You can see from the picture on the right that we made the beam pop out the second story doors, allowing us to hoist loads from trucks below.

And given that our 55 gallon barrels of maple syrup weigh about 650 pounds, we added a surprisingly cheap winch crane to attach to the trolley. If this contraption doesn’t kill one of us, it’ll be very handy. Most of our bulk maple syrup, intended for wholesale use, will be hoisted up into this second story for storage over the year.

Once the barrels make it through the doorway, we can drop them onto dollies and push them around. To accommodate this, the floor system up there was built 12-inch-on-center, with heftier stringers than you’d put in a residential structure.

Just because they felt like it, the boys opted to build the barn post-and-beam. Its a pretty old-timey structure, with about all of the design conforming to specific sugaring use. That seemed like a compromise at first, but it’s the more beautiful for it.

Robert and the boys have since thought they  might build these sorts of structures for other folks, seeing how smoothly this one went up. They went and created the site Vermont Cedar Cabins and have been doing some work in this line.

Meanwhile, back at the barn, we need to get the 600 gallon sap tank installed up top. Lots of vacuum plumbing yet to be done. That tank will have a four-inch pipe coming out of it, where we can operate a big butterfly valve from below to start the sap filling up our utility vehicle tank for transport over to the sugar shack. This’ll be quite a tweaking process. It doesn’t take much time for a four-inch pipe of sap coming from 18 feet off the ground to get someone wet. Should be interesting.

I’ve set up a small finishing room in the back, and that’s been working out nicely. We’ll be able to get the barrels up stairs started with heating (purchased a used barrel warmer), and then pipe it on down to get to sterile temperatures for packing.

[Glug glug glug. Maple syrup it ain't.]

One friend opted to welcome the drizzle, turning his head up, opening his mouth to take a swig of the falling sap, in hopes of quenching his thirst. This is the last picture I got that stayed in focus, as after he started gagging, I started rolling around laughing. He didn’t realize how much sawdust was going to come down with that sap.

You might note in that picture the funny Coke can antennae hanging from the rafters as well. I put those up there in order to make people avoid clocking their heads on the I-beam we installed there, running outside. We have a small trolley system that can run large barrels of maple syrup or pallets of wood in and out of the sugarhouse. I’ll put up more pictures of that system, but suffice it to say for now that the ugly Coke can strategy has worked pretty well. We’ve had that I-beam at eye-level for a couple weeks, and no one has beaned themselves, which is just short of miraculous.

We broke the 500 gallons of maple syrup mark yesterday in what was probably our second-to-last boil. Today we’re collecting sap, along with more tomorrow, and that’ll very likely be the last boil of 2009. My wife will be very, very pleased about that, but I could stand to have it run a few more weeks. There’s always next year.

I am looking for some help in my own attempt at maple sugaring. This is the first time we have ever attempted this, and the syrup we produced has a very off flavor. Almost like rotten fruit? Any tips? -Tara

There are a few things that can cause these off flavors in maple syrup. I’ll list them out, and perhaps one or two will jump out at you.

Perhaps the most common cause of such an off flavor is boiling sap that has been kept too long before boiling, or stored in a warm and/or concentrated form. I made some very nice rotten fruit maple syrup a year ago on my last day, concentrating some sap partially and then letting it sit up in the sugarhouse attic for three days getting nice and toasty in the April sun before doing my last boil. Specifically, it tasted like rotten oranges. I sacrificed that batch to the farmyard as an offering for a good maple syrup season in 2009.

Remember that while bacteria are breeding in your sap, they’re eating your sugar and excreting compounds that are generally not good for the maple syrup flavor. The specific type of critters you have growing can vary, and their off-flavors will vary along with them. We’re contemplating installing an ultra-violet filtering system on our sap and concentrate tanks next year, so as to be able to more comfortably store sap and boil more strategically. For the backyard sugarer, that wouldn’t make any sense at all. You might, though, contemplate whether or not you really want to hold over sap from Monday’s buckets to the Saturday during which you have time to boil.

Sometimes, rather unpredictably, maple trees will go through a “metabolism” stage, where it will generate an off-flavored sap. When that happens, it’s usually not a local phenomenon, and can be seen across an area. I haven’t had this happen to me, but a few years back a lot of New England maple syrup producers found this happening, and they reported that the maple syrup had a distinct “sweaty sock” taste. Makes your mouth water just thinking about it. Proctor Maple Research Center is in the midst of some good research on this phenomenon. They’re trying to pin down both the cause and any actions a sugarmaker might take in order to prevent or correct the problem.

I have a few local folks who just started maple syruping coming by the sugar shack this year, showing off some samples of Fancy maple syrup. That’s impressive, given that it’s tough to make fancy off a stovetop, but it’s also fairly common for the light and subtle taste of fancy maple syrup to reveal the presence of pan cleaner residue, or even of odors baked into the sap while boiling, such as cigarette smoke or just plain not-very-well-vented firebox smoke. With the sometimes fruity taste of fancy maple syrup, those off-flavors can combine to give a rotten fruit sort of flavor.

Finally, we’ve seen different sorts of areas in New England throw different maple syrup flavors. Our bush behind our house, for instance, throws a vanilla-like maple syrup flavor. The bush we rent over in Strafford, the town next door, has an intense “put-hair-on-your-chest” maple maple syrup flavor. This past year, my wife held a maple syrup tasting with author Amy Trubek, the author of “Taste of Place.” We had a couple dozen folks in Norwich tasting maple syrup from different regions, and it was quite stark how they had different flavors, ranging from the woody to the fruity. You may find that you have trees that throw a particular flavor. If it really tastes like rotten fruit, it is likely that boiling the sap more quickly, keeping it cool when not boiling and finishing the syrup to a good thickness will make the flavor seem a benefit rather than a problem. Please do let us know if any of this sounds relevant, and if you find your maple syrup is able to shed the off flavor.

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"]