SEGUIN SUGAR BUSH "Dan explains in detail how they process maple syrup"

[Applause] good morning Dan good morning Siobhan so where are we here today we're actually in Falconer Township which borders municipality of West Nipissing and French River in Northern Ontario all right so is this your property or are you in partnership with someone else we're actually on Crown land which is rented from the crown we've been making maple syrup here since the family since 1953 the pre generations before that was the bullier family since 1928 Wow yeah we run this operation with myself and my wife and we have help from longtime friends and relatives my brother-in-law Michelle and sister Louise are active in their in their retirement and they help us make syrup you know that's nice that you get all that help wheaton if you find if you need something done find a busy person all right so I guess you got to show me your operation now we'll take you around and we'll show you that where we go through in a day wow there's a lot of firewood here you need firewood to make Sarah you need firewood I joined this at this time we were just completing a pan change we finished last night we made two batches in sear and every morning when I'll start up I'll actually start with a fresh set of hands for my finishing patterns on the front scope Adler changed and I'm just going to pump my concentrate back in and once the reverse osmosis catches up to the two tanks of sad that we collected yesterday we will process that two toward the day okay so yeah I see a lotta stainless steel in here I'm sure that's not cheap no no no there's a the cost of producing food and everything has to be food great yeah I'm familiar with that a little bit throwing water for 16 years I'm sure you are so are you gonna show me that River you started with the SAP yeah I remember yeah we certainly will work should get this initiated here okay gold in here or do that wow that's a lotta stainless steel [Music] anybody that's familiar with turkey with maple know that as soon as you point out produce a lot of scale in nighter so every time every morning when we started up all the instruments have to be be scales so it's a little bit more people boil hard water it makes a scale yeah yeah and it's funny you can filter SAP 20 times and it will still do it it's a mineral and so these mineral left mineralization of hers to children it's actually transformed into syrup okay [Music] you need to set the proper depth so that it doesn't go too close to the bottom of the pan also would and that's the sentence or yeah there's one in each of our finishing pens and once we start boiling here we'll have a bunch of reading with the temperatures of the concentrate times it's actually going through the process oh so that's how you don't want to stop boiling continuous boil where see relaxed and continuously poured off as it's ready when it reaches the desired temperature there's an auto puddle drop or several regulators that will actually activate and let chase or the hot air balloons those temps to go down and then it sets off yet so that you are always free low at a consistent but that's always the same okay so this both machine here is your boiler yep so I'm assuming that the water before it goes into this machine it goes either reverse osmosis first yes we'll show you that right now and that is to to maximize the mineral content of the sound of this SAP so that you don't waste so much energy boiling your water yeah if we would not have a reverse osmosis system we need an evaporator three times this size than the woodshed defines that side until the outer powers so you would burn three times more wood yes Wow [Music] be pumping the pressure pump first arrived in Canada [Music] first of all three [Music] the bonus points lies okay the water back outside and reverse osmosis the room I was very noisy in there so we're gonna talk outside their room so I just want to mention the reverse osmosis what Dan is doing he's got the to concentrate water and the furry water so for him and the prorate water he you probably just throwing that water away right yeah we do we save a lot of it because we need trailer a fair amount of it to actually want the RO itself it should never use just straight well water to wash the membrane as you actually need water that's a q3 and minerals right yeah so we save a lot of it for that with the rest of it yes but outside though most of it you throw it away yeah but you can also use that for rate water to put it in your batteries for your car let's say possible I know there's lots of also distilled water then we'll have to use four batteries and so on yeah I wasn't sure about the permeate yeah I know you know it depends how much mineral content there's in the water but I know on my one I used to sell water it was good enough for batteries parts-per-million was only one hey an distilled water is usually zero so it was very very close but anyways that was the perfect water that's the water I was selling people would buy that to make their coffee or yeah are some people they disliked the mineralogy mineralized water exactly so everything and my permanent water was a waste for me but for you this is what you keep it's more this stuff is more concentrated than the frigging is also like an excess byproduct yeah so so what were you saying earlier about the this SAP is how many percent yesterday our stop coming in was two point eight percent two point eight percent sugar okay we've seen anything to one point five three point two in the highest but if my name is actually pretty good and it's typical of a cold winter and a cold spring SAP flows are very negligible like small but your sugar content is usually higher but it seems like there's but the same water sugar but it's just a different mechanism translocation from the tree yeah okay so let's say an average of 2% sugar so after you're done with their reverse osmosis omelet percent is it if we're actually gone sap a tumor will be about 7.5 because we'll take we're taking about 70% of the water Oh 72 or so no yesterday at 2.8 we were finishing up with a concentrate of about eight and a half okay is is there any possibility to to finish what a constant rate of ten or fifteen absolutely you just max up the pressure and control your you're out float the post and you can concentrate on the single path up to 12 they make equipment now that will actually do a single pass up to 35 bricks but when you get to 35 bricks that really changes the game as far as evaporation going you have to you would have to change the whole setup of evaporation because you're sad your concentrates only going to be on the evaporator for less than an hour it's a very fast process and give flavor to sear the altered bullpen and the blue pens very strong command for boiling quickly and then a slow evaporation on a flat pan surface for that majority for about 75 percent of the length of the evaporator so that that's what it will give flavor to your thermal ionization of your sugars okay so that's why you stop at eight percentage to give them April 7 or later yeah we've only had an RO since about nine years now and at first we were afraid to try because we thought it would actually change the flavor of our syrup but it didn't but if you push the envelope when you go higher than 10% you're definitely going to have to change your mechanism you're boiling protests all right Dan so this is all maple syrup SAP it hasn't been through gone through a reverse osmosis yet this at seven we collected yesterday from in our locations and it's actually going through the RO right now and concentrator dr. Jeanne plumbed up upstairs into our concentrate thanks and we'll take you up there right now all right so this is just one day of SAP yeah this is a small day because see we collected about 8,000 liters of sap total on on $8,000 oh wow that's a lot of work these are our concentrate ganks this is what is actually coming out of the RO that we just saw a few minutes ago and this will be rotate about eight and a half nine percent tricks for our maximum okay when you say eight and a standard rings watches correct need bricks is a term is a scale to use it to measure solids in in in liquids it'll actually measure like the viscosity and if I actually have serum that gets really thick minute bare minimum is 66 percent bricks I shoot for 67 but you let's see if you have something that gets away on you that's you know finished with a 70 or so it's very thick and you'll actually will actually you'll see it a crystal form in the bottom of the container over a little bit of time okay so it's not it's not that as long as it's not Portland it's hot back but as soon as you open it within weeks you'd see a full liner of candy crystals on the bottom of your container oh yeah so I guess we're standing to pretty much directly above your reverse osmosis system here right now yes we all will do everything in doubles like the idea having two tanks maple sap is notorious for growing bacteria so any as soon as the tank is empty and its first thing we do will actually wash it even if we're going nonstop all day and this will actually go on yeah I can actually what 700 gallons of concentrate here which represents about 2,500 gallons of sap but on a good day you'll get 8,000 gallons the SAP coming through the system so we'll have to keep going and every time when I do a batch I will actually transfer one one tank I'll use it and when this one gets full I love be concentrating in the other tank and that gives me a break between my three tanks to actually wash it even if it's only only in there for 3-4 hours it grows a film it's what mental sound does okay that's why one time from a very very small outfit and by maple syrup really weird and and oh yeah it's a it's a challenge that every may have to produce interfaces even ourselves here when you get at the tail end of the season and things warm up even if your are saps they are our sound punk stations are actually always cool in the freshmen just the transportation of the SAP in in Kubek and will actually have to pump stations about two thousand feet at each end of the property here and SAP will leave the other end at about six seven percent six seven degrees and it'll get here at about fifteen so our arms up it warms up in the black tubing in your fight even in thin blue piping tip like Sun wash it gets at it and raises the tempo so once you once it gets here you have to process it right away we cannot store SAP or concentrate at the end of the season it goes bad within 12 hours yeah you got you got a pulsar well I've been by your middle Sarah for many years now and I had never went bad on these so well we try to have a consistent product that's usually always the same of course if there's variances of early season late seasons here which is only normal but we shoot to have a quality product all right so this is a smokestack here when you burn say what boil the SAP 18 inches in down or 2000 it's 40 pegs are you pointed but not only oh you got a three-stop audit no super to speed with this is for my departure alright now we're going to the pump house unfortunate you won't see any SAP flowing this morning because it went down to minus 10 last night but throughout the fourth road the two hundred acres that we tap on there's about 50 kilometers of little blue pipe and main line and then about another 10 kilometers of wire that actually suspends all the mainland wow that's a lot of pipe it took us a while to said that if we did it over I think four different years but if the answer to that is a lot better not better but it's a lot more productive than the buckets I guess so yeah we used to have six thousand buckets together and that was take us two days back I reckon working yeah but it would never stop you could take us two days to do the loop and after the second day well your buckets are still full so you got to keep going start all over again yeah and the equipment we were using we're of course as a kid going up with the horses but then in 80s we got into track muskeg carriers made by Bombardier but those things were my age and to keep machines like that running you always needed to because you need a backup and the problem was to get parts so we would have had to change those to Bamba deers and to something more modern and by the cost of just those machines was the cost of the two weights and the bonus was is that we didn't know at the time but when we went to tubing we we almost doubled our production well we did actually because our best our average was about point forty five litre per tap on buckets and / leader for tap on tubing now so and the other cap the other side of the coin is that you totally eliminated those equipment those track carriers at the worst time of the year so no more soil erosion no more compaction and no more cutting roots and now we just use snowshoe the boot and the four-wheelers in the ski-doos well that's much better yes now there's the tubing stay there year-round yep it stays up year-round at the end of season we'll actually wash our tubing using a solution of isopropyl alcohol 70/30 70 alcohol at 30 water and we'll use about 45 milliliter per tap so always starting at the top end you wash under vacuum and as you clean your taps you will actually take them out and cap them so you always have some that actually stays in your drop lines and your small tubing and it'll actually this dissipates throughout the season and prevents any mold growth Wow it's a pretty complicated process yes but it's it's efficient and as far as washing to be the other system the other option would be to push with water in chlorine and I'm not fond of chlorine in in plastic doing plastic is also porous and that I've tasted syrups that but I found chlorine and in that David and I did not like it so I ate away from chlorine I know exactly what you mean because when I used to sell bottled water my soap that I that I was using I was making sure there was no chlorine in the soap yes as I know the chlorine it goes in the plastic and then it stays there and you can taste it after and there's also salts in in the chlorine and here we have a lot of little critters like squirrels which loved chewing tubing especially with their salt in itself oh man is that not it does not eliminate it but it reduces it reduces yes [Applause] so this is a large tubing here dan what is this one here why is it so large this one actually is my vacuum translocator from my my vacuum pumps I have a seven half horse vacuum pump that actually runs in the generator shock will actually do vacuum to 22 inches mercury and get about a 2100 I get about a one inch difference between my pump and my extractor here so follow me and I'll show you the extractor this is a new unit to us we had quite a bit of snow here in Northern Ontario this year and we actually lost this building it collapsed on us I was too late and shoveling it by one day i shelled my generator and the next morning when I came to shovel this one it was flat on the ground oh no we lost the equipment that was in it which was another extractor when we found this one while we ordered this one and it came in I think it was installed on a 16th March just in time for the season this system is actually quite I love the simplicity of it it's just a single vessel you you you put your vacuum on one vessel and there's no fluctuation in in the vacuum even when you're evacuating the SAP out of it it's just that a submersible pump that actually sits in the bottom and there's three sensors when it fills through about 80 percent or just above the outlet of the the main lights and actually a pump and will continuously pump until it empty remaining and if I have 21 inches of vacuum I will have 21 inches of vacuum at the end of my mainline throughout the pumping cycle my old extractor actually had a solenoids off and with a double chamber and while it was evacuating the SAP in the bottom it would flip a solenoid and all the vacuum would be transferred to the top vessel but in that one second as it happened it was out you'd always get a back flush of SAP back to the saddle and back to the treat the idea is to always keep your SAP flow going one way so that your your tap hole at the tree does not recognize old SAP old SAP will actually be it tells the tree to stop to heal so that tree had that section of the top hole actually wants to dry out so by keeping the sap flow always going one way you will actually extend your season right to the end till then you get into buddy SAP and then it's time to stop wow that's a pretty sophisticated machine it works with it it's mine mine sounds sophisticated but it's so simple and because it's just a single vessel and sensors okay ideally an extractor like this or all extractors could be set up in a heated room where where you can actually keep doing vacuum right up until your drop points freeze all of our pump houses have stayed open like this because our two other pump houses actually have tanks installed in them and we want to keep them open to keep the SAP cooler and fresher until we're ready to push it true okay so as we can see there's no SAP in there right now because it's almost like minus 10 we're still early in the morning so this afternoon it's gonna be friction all right yep what I could do actually I can just turn this on on automatic and open the valves and when SAP starts to flow in automatic and I'll be in the pump house and I'll see SAP start to happen then I'd have to come back here and shut half the valves act activate the vacuum and give it a minute and then open the rest of the valves because if I do it all with all the valves open I would actually flood the vessel oh and my moisture trap will get filled up and problems yeah yeah so the four is all with here dan what are they be doing they just walked up the hands that we finished up with yesterday just our finishing pants like when you first showed up I think we're just yeah just completing the change and it just washes all of this scale that actually forms on the bottom the mineralization that's why you actually have to change pants every 30 35 gallons and if you don't you get enough too much night or build up on the bottom of your pan and your simple scorch it'll flake and we'll end up with little black spots on your pan and also a darker or stronger facings here okay yeah wow that's point that fire chamber 40 inches of that you can actually troll lumber on fire right on will only fire in the grill new 24 inch wood but I try to stagger fire has only been on for about five minutes now we gotta do this now you're gonna give it more I'm not going to like it alright now think your work for there's quite that nice aroma here it's dirty it smell like maple syrup after you so it takes me a while to actually get the density setting right so I always start high I'll work it down if I have to a boiling point is quite - e - eleven point six so I got it set like I think nine degrees over just to make sure about the first drop is actually picking up and the density is high enough they can always bring it down but it's tough to bring it up because then I got to really concentrate the rest of us here to mix in with the serum that's not quite ready and that's not how I like to do think that starting picking okay so where did you see it's good to be the sap is gonna drop where is that right here the session just a little it's actually got a temperature probe inside the pan here yeah that's what you see the readings that you see on the little apparatus on the board now I'll hold it and it holds it and I'll go above then it'll actually start to hold the ball a little and I'll limit the car limit the volume with this valve here so that it doesn't all of gush out because then I get a lot of mixing going to keep this valve over that thought a third if I think it looks a little bit thin I will actually slow it down but I need at least a couple gallons and in my sit down here to attest yeah what happens with the rest No setting at 50 Suriname give it a couple minutes and Hypertherm it's a hybrid between a hydrometer and a thermometer the thicker to sear the higher up in quotes we'll calibrate with the temperature of the liquid lots of other hydrometers that will work but they're very temperature specific work with hot or cold here yeah that's about it 67 - which is where okay 60 heavier which is where you'll get producers that do a lot of selling bulk in by the barrel they're paid by the pound packers that actually buy it will actually blend it and if they actually have syrup that's under density they will actually mix it with the thicker you can actually have a product that they can put on her shelf and even if they have a Bachelor of 68 or 67 and change the before they packet they will heat it because it's got to be hot back and they will add distilled water to cut it to 66 percent which it okay so nothing is lost so season yes how many hours in AP work Oh anywhere from twelve on a good day too 22 on a bad day so I shouldn't say bad day on a better date on a better day so once it's all over these super like two days straight there we acclimatize we slow down I mentioned to you that the RO is like our MVP number two this is our MVP number one that's a happy number one yes she carries the oh wow it smells really good here what are you cooking today there's a pork loin in the oven there's the beef barley soup on the goal and they're going to be served tomato macaroni and cheese instead of potatoes to make so you're gonna cook further work work true here I am I am so so then you mentioned earlier that on a good day you might be working 22 hours a day yes and you're in the middle of the bush here so after to go do you go home and sleep where you sleep here home this is home for us during the run so you stay here the whole time in the bush I do go out I do go out when between runs when we have moderate SAP flows and to bring syrup out and so on and my wife Tracy is also MVP number one she keeps things looked after at home as far as paperwork organization and signing of tours and so on so it's it's not something that a person can say I'm going to do by myself it's impossible no yes so much work oh yeah there's you got to surround yourself with good people and be able to delegate and be there to work when they were when the workload comes so you're gonna show me where you sleep and by all means you're gonna turn around you're gonna walk that way it's not easy but it's temporary well yeah and we spend the problem II like only a quarter of our time in here yeah yeah so it's but it served us well I grew up as a kid coming to this camp and this camp here this section was new before I was 10 years old there used to be another old log cabin there in front of the door here and it had been built by the boyars and had been here since 1928 but I remember as a kid like coming here with the uncles and they'd make sure that our boots and our myths were hung up to dry at night and then in the morning after the bush we'd go again so you're roughing it up for what six weeks or yes yeah sometimes it's two and a half months but we only stay here like full-time when the SAP is running language which is normally in anywhere about a month yeah so I see there's what five beds in here there is well our kids come in come in also on the weekends they're grad school now but so that we fill the camp for the for the weekends okay yeah so is there like problems with snoring yes we have earplugs our kids have gotten accustomed to the earplugs very nice well it's just the way of life it is yeah like you say you're roughing it for four to six weeks and then you go home and have a luxurious house you live more in luxury live more in luxury yes but running water oh I have to go outside when you go to the washroom no that's okay yeah fair enough so what is this machine here Dan all it is is a water jacket taken all of our syrup that's actually that will come on this side of the of the filter filter press on nine in the evaporator room will actually be plumbed into here so once it's actually filtered it never sees open air again it'll actually be reheated in ears and maintained between 160 and 180 and it'll be remodeled into containers anywhere from 100 ml up to a four liter and once we have about a third of our season done we will actually start the barrel syrup actually attack 32 gallon barrels in stainless barrels where we will actually store them at home and as we need it we'll warm them up I have another machine like that at home and we reheat the syrup and repack the clock the idea is not to have any retail containers of especially the smaller size is more than 2 months ahead of time okay so you can bottle throughout the scene throughout the year correct yep okay how many gallons of milk is certainly you produce per season our average season would be about 2,000 mr. buck 2,000 gallons would be in normal would be our average we produce up to 3,000 and we've also produced a thousand so depends on a year correct if you take our top season out and our bottom season out we're looking at about a 2020 100 gallon average and who do you sell all this maple syrup to throughout Northeastern Ontario here the majority is actually right from farm gate sales but we do market a little bit wholesale through both the 20 25 different outlets from our northeastern level all the way up to caps casing but majority of it is quite local around subgrade North Bay we're missing okay so - their stores do you deliver that yourself we do we'll have a monthly delivery where we'll do a loop and either will start up on the east side and finish up on the west side er and we keep the shelves stocked that way so what kind of truck do you need for that Subaru really so yeah I don't drive around like a three-ton truck or nothing No no see the majority of it will be but we will fill the car anywhere from 30 to 50 gallons that's all in different containers of course and we also do we also have honeybees so at the same time those stores will usually carry honey in and middle sir yes yes your honey is very taste very good as well well that we've had a lot of support from the local people and it shored up with well I'm glad a tea you can deliver your maple syrup put a car because let me tell you a commercial truck is very expensive they are I also have a commercial trailer on for my pickup minutes yes I know the cost of running up yeah a commercial vehicle yes okay thanks Dan you're welcome

Channel: French River Woodworks

Views: 20,061

Keywords: maple syrup, sugra bush, maple butter, maple sugar, maple sugar process

Id: jzFQctCbOVw

Length: 37min 15sec (2235 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2019