So after five or so hours of boiling, our 40 gallons of sap has
magically turned into a gallon of syrup, right?
Oh, if only. To “finish” the
syrup to the proper 66% sugar content in the pan would be to risk overshooting
the evaporation and scorching the syrup.
Thus rendering the syrup inedible, and leaving the evaporator operator
sobbing in the corner of the sugar shack in the fetal position. Nobody wants to see that. So the trickiest part of the entire syrup
operation might be deciding when to pull the pan off the wood stove and transfer
the near-syrup to a large pot to be finished over a more controlled heat
source. Pull the pan off too early, and
we waste lots of time boiling off water we could have boiled in the more
efficient flat pan. Pull it off too late
and, yup, we’ll be playing “Taps” for our fallen batch of syrup.
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| Maple Sap Streaming into the Boiling Pan |
Since we’ve engaged in a couple of 12+ hour, 180 gallon
boiling marathons this season, we’ve faced an even more difficult
decision: when to quit feeding the fire
at the end of the night? Once the last
of the sap has left the barrel and streamed into the pan, there’s still quite a bit of
boiling to do. So rather than staying up
another two hours to feed the fire and pull off the pan to cool, we stop
stoking the fire and let the residual heat of the stove and the sap do a little
more evaporating before morning, when we'll fire up the finishing operation. As you might imagine, estimating how much
evaporating happens while we’re sleeping is like estimating how long our kids' good mood will last after the maple syrup sugar rush wears off. In other
words, nearly impossible. We nearly lost
our first batch this way – we woke up to nearly-finished syrup in our pan, just
a smidgen away from scorched syrup.
Thankfully, we were still a few points away from the magic 66% sugar content
for finished syrup, so we didn’t lose any of our sweet amber goodness. Sweet dreams, indeed!
