Portage River Farm
Notes on our struggles and successes on our family farm in rural Michigan.
(Pinckney, Michigan)
03 Mar Tue 2009
Sugarin'" Bad News and Good News
Mildly Bad News:
As it turns out, the previous post should have been labeled "Two Major Improvements". My attempt to fix my syrup filtering aggravations had mixed results. It is true that the thin liquid that had not made it quite to concentration went through the filter material much more quickly. The problem is that the next morning, Sean picked up one of the syrup bottles and noted that it was a little bit cloudy. That cloudiness is slowly drifting to the bottom of the bottles and it won't affect the taste of the syrup, but it shows that my idea didn't work out so well.
Since then I've also noticed that my first batch of syrup is considerably thicker than the second. That was caused by my failure to reduce the heat below the pot and overshooting the specific gravity measurement. That is probably why I had such a hard time filtering it in the first place. In any case, I'm learning something with each mistake. For the next round I will go back to filtering after the boiling is completed and hopefully having the correct concentration will make it easier.
(Sorry if this is too technical to be very interesting. I get that way sometimes!)
Really Good News!:
As you may have read, I calculated the sugar concentration of the sap from my first run of syrup and came up with 1.07% sugar. That meant that I would need to boil down 73 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup.
This most recent run yielded a whopping 1/2 gallon of syrup from 22 gallons of sap. That was a much greater yield than I had expected and indicates that it would only take 44 gallons of sap to make a full gallon. That puts the sugar concentration of those 22 gallons at a much more respectable 1.96%.
Sugar maples generally have a sugar concentration of 2-2.5%. From my previous results, I had assumed that we mostly had silver and red maples. These improved numbers are a good indication that we probably do have some of the prized sugar maples afterall. This summer, I plan to positively identify the species and we'll know for sure. In the mean time, it appears that our yield of syrup will be better than I was anticipating after the first run.
As it turns out, the previous post should have been labeled "Two Major Improvements". My attempt to fix my syrup filtering aggravations had mixed results. It is true that the thin liquid that had not made it quite to concentration went through the filter material much more quickly. The problem is that the next morning, Sean picked up one of the syrup bottles and noted that it was a little bit cloudy. That cloudiness is slowly drifting to the bottom of the bottles and it won't affect the taste of the syrup, but it shows that my idea didn't work out so well.
Since then I've also noticed that my first batch of syrup is considerably thicker than the second. That was caused by my failure to reduce the heat below the pot and overshooting the specific gravity measurement. That is probably why I had such a hard time filtering it in the first place. In any case, I'm learning something with each mistake. For the next round I will go back to filtering after the boiling is completed and hopefully having the correct concentration will make it easier.
(Sorry if this is too technical to be very interesting. I get that way sometimes!)
Really Good News!:
As you may have read, I calculated the sugar concentration of the sap from my first run of syrup and came up with 1.07% sugar. That meant that I would need to boil down 73 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup.
This most recent run yielded a whopping 1/2 gallon of syrup from 22 gallons of sap. That was a much greater yield than I had expected and indicates that it would only take 44 gallons of sap to make a full gallon. That puts the sugar concentration of those 22 gallons at a much more respectable 1.96%.
Sugar maples generally have a sugar concentration of 2-2.5%. From my previous results, I had assumed that we mostly had silver and red maples. These improved numbers are a good indication that we probably do have some of the prized sugar maples afterall. This summer, I plan to positively identify the species and we'll know for sure. In the mean time, it appears that our yield of syrup will be better than I was anticipating after the first run.
John_3
11:00 PM EST
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