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.

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"]

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.

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.