The 2022 Maple Syrup Season has Started!

More specifically, our first boil of the 2022 season began yesterday. Yes, although we're excited to be back making maple syrup, preparations for this season actually began months ago. The season really began soon as the last season ended and we began refilling the woodshed, repairs and upgrades to our collection lines and work on new sugar house.

Here is our supply of wood for this year's season, about 30 cords.  Each day that we boil, we typically use 1 - 3 cords.  Let's hope that we need it all. 

Day 1 of the season is always somewhat stressful as we get all of the equipment in operation and try to make sure that we have not forgotten to do something or find out that some piece of equipment has been misplaced or even broken. Each year there are lessons to be learned. This year we realized that it s not a great idea to leave the reassembly of the evaporator to the day that you plan to boil. For the past few weeks, we have been focused on tapping and repairs/upgrades to our vacuum lines. If we had taken time to put the evaporator back together, we would have discovered that one of our floats was damaged after last season.

Thanks to the amazing effort of Ken Baird at Mainstreet Automotive in North Gower, we had the float repaired that same day and barely lost any production time. Thanks Ken!!

Here is some of the first syrup of 2022 ...

Maple syrup is usually ready when the boiling temperature has reached about 7F degrees above boiling point of water which is about 212F. Since the boiling point varies with weather conditions, each day we check the density of the syrup with a hydrometer and adjust the take-off temperature accordingly.

DB