Here are notes from the log book:
3/3 Cold rain yesterday dampened run, no freeze last night, sunny morning, then clouded over. Run improved.
3/4 No freeze last night, cloudy, high in 40’s.
3/5 No freeze last night, another cloudy day in 40’s and rainy.
3/6 Broken record, plus constant rain. If only it would snow, feels so much like mid-April.
3/7 Déjà vu all over again! Heavy rains from yesterday have subsided. Sap quantity, sap sugar content, and syrup grade are slowly dropping. But, a change in the air. Feeling colder this afternoon with a solid freeze forecasted for tonight. Just what the doctor ordered!
3/8 Down to 24 degrees last night, into upper 40’s today with unfiltered sunshine all day. What would be described as a perfect sugaring day.
HOW’S IT RUNNING? During the thaw it was one steady, though tapering, Pilgrim Run. After the freeze the sap gushed. At this writing the run has settled back into pilgrim mode.
BOILING STATUS: Today, Day Ten, is the seventh consecutive boiling day.
SAP SWEETNESS: The range through the week was 2.3-1.8% sugar.
NITER NOTES: The niter is heavy: It precipitates out of the boiling sap like beach sand. We call it sugar sand. Judging by the large scoopfuls of it in the front pan, we’re in mid-season.
MUSIC TO BOIL BY:
Kaytraminé – ‘Who He is’
Supertramp – ‘The Logical Song’
John Prine – ‘That’s the Way that the World Goes ‘Round’
Dua Lipa – ‘Future Nostalgia’
Pokey LaFarge – ‘End of My Rope’
WHAT’S NEXT? No one seems to know. At this writing it’s 32 degrees and snowing.
QUOTE OF THE DAY (anonymous): “Every year is just like we’ve never sugared.”
Sap tank detail. [LC photo]
The Nebraska Knoll Blog 
Well, that was quite a week – no slowly adjusting to sugaring, having time to get everything tuned in. It’s been quite a push and I spent the whole week feeling desperately behind as I tried to triage my way through each day.
But, we made it, and pretty much everything seems to be working. There are a couple of remaining broken wires in the woods, a couple probes and some pvc work in one releaser that need attention, and I still haven’t rotated my RO membranes, but the vacuum is tight, sap moves to the sugarhouse, and we’ve finally found the DE rhythm (a 4 cup scoop into the draw tank every 2 minutes, which is extreme) for manageable filtering.
Our runs sound pretty much the same as yours, though we actually saw it perk up a bit Wednesday and Thursday – either the snowpack melting back enough, or a cooling event substantial enough to recharge things. Friday and Saturday ran absurdly hard. I’ve no Idea how to post a picture here, but my friend who works in the woods took a video of a 1.5″ wet line running absolutely full (the blue we used for our wet lines here is translucent enough that you can often see liquid in it when backlit by the sun) on Friday afternoon. There were a couple of 1″ mainlines that also were running full pipe by the time they reached the wet/dry’s, and the monitor boxes flagged them as leaking as there wasn’t enough volume in the pipe to move both sap and air. Confoundingly, following the freeze on Thursday night, our sugar content dropped from 1.9 to 1.4, then bounced back to 1.6 yesterday. I’d suspect a broken hydrometer, but the ratio of syrup produced to RO hours also speaks to weak sap.
As to boiling, we found our stride last night. The syrup still doesn’t filter well, but we’ve got it moving enough that press changes aren’t torrid race – which creates enough space to stay on top of everything else. The hope had been to hold off on boiling until today and it was dishearteningly late when we fired up the boiler, but once we stepped into the vortex, time fell away, barrels were cleaned and filled, syrup was standardized, de was stirred in, the presses were swapped and cleaned, and suddenly the RO had chewed through all the raw sap moments before the evaporator drained the concentrate tank. The only thing to interrupt the sugarhouse laps was a moment sitting next to Jennie in Adirondack chairs eating dinner, but even that somehow blends into the swirl of an evening in the boiling room.
I’m writing from my couch, watching fat snow flakes swirl outside the window while melt water drips from the eaves. Sap is coming into the tanks – it briefly ran hard from 12-2 last night, and seems to be picking up again as the day warms.
Hope you can take advantage of what looks to be a brief respite, before the weather puts us all back to full throttle!
BSH
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Thanks for the vivid dispatch, Ben. What a thrill to witness main lines running full.
Yesterday’s snow felt so right. The lower trees responded by running lickety-split. We boiled late afternoon and evening and today feel the bliss of having a day off. The relaxed pace “makes my heart sing” says Chops.
The issue here with filtering is leaks in the press. Once, syrup spurted up onto the side of the arch.
Carry on. AC
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Word has it that you made a whopping 1300 gallons the other day. Is that a record for you, I wonder. Today’s sap is sweeter, we can taste it in the sap coffee. It’s over 2% again which is a relief. AC
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We did have a pretty good day the other day! Since we swapped our sugarhouse equipment out for the 2022 season, my guess would be that 1300 is in the upper quarter of boils we’ve had. The 2022 season had a run of really absurd boils, with a high of 1800 gallons one day. Even before 2022, we had a 1500 gallon day on our wood fired evaporator – which I suspect will stand as the landmark boil in this sugarhouse. It was a 28 hour affair, with an hour long break to swap the pans over a hot firebox around 4 am. But generally, if we’re boiling 2-3 days sap from decent runs, we’ll fill between 20 and 28 55 gallon drums in a boil, and we prefer to boil like that for efficiency’s sake. Once we’re making syrup we fill 4-6 barrels an hour, so it’s not as daunting as the numbers would suggest.
Our sap is up around 2% also (I’m not entirely sure I trust my sap hydrometer, it’s showing my permeate as something like -.3 brix). It was absolutely gorgeous to look at at 2.30 last night before I had to turn the RO back on -crystal clear aquamarine glimpsed through clouds of snow white foam. Our tanks were dry at 9 pm as we wrapped up a fairly disjointed boil (generator issues), but boy did the run pick up overnight. It seems we were collecting close to 4,000 gallons an hour from 11-1.
Some sections of the woods froze last night, and driveway felt frozen this morning, but we never stopped seeing sap. The run is definitely picking up with the sun, and I need to go hurry the RO wash cycle….
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