Warren Gives a Season Update

I am down at the sugar house right now Warren is actually inside boiling for once he is boiling while it's still daylight outside so it is 60° today it has been an absolute roller coaster in terms of the weather and temperature around here and I think it's either tomorrow night I believe it's supposed to drop down into the teens again so like I said just a roller coaster of temperatures but the season has been going good he is boiling we are actually going to head inside and maybe he'll give us a little tour it's almost all gone only last like 5 [Applause] [Music] [Applause] minutes it's about 6:30 I just fired up the evaporator I'm just waiting for the sap to heat up just a few hot moments we'll have some fresh syrup coming off last night was actually golden I was surprised I'm surprised it's not turning into Amber or dark yet but so this is our Auto draw as soon as the syrup is up the temperature it'll automatically start coming out still got five more degrees to go we'll fill one side at a time once this side is full I'll just switch it from that side to this side I'll add the filter eight in mix it up and then just keep switching back and forth all night long I'm just waiting for surf to draw off not much happening right now [Applause] [Music] [Applause] this is our Mira 300 horsepower steam boiler I just kicked it on high fire I always let it run for like a half hour on low fired until the whole system is up the temperature that way I'm not shocking the boiler so now that it's on high fire it should start making syrup really fast once syrup starts coming out of the evaporator it'll make about 300 gallons of syrup an hour and that's running the concentrate at about 25 to 26 [Applause] bricks so the steam is coming in through that 4in the big pipe the 4-in pipe goes through this manifold into all these 1in lines so each each line feeds a 1in stainless pipe inside here so this is one Loop it goes down and back this is another loop goes down and back and then that's the bottom Loop comes down and back and the condensate goes into the bottom there and it just gets pushed back into the feed tank the boiler feed tank first draw of the night Nikki that's what working like a slave turns into so far it looks like The Season's coming to an early end the season start started actually a week later than last year but we haven't had too many freezes and it's only the beginning of March and we had we've had 2 70° days so far and the TR the sap output basically slowed right in half and if it freezes again I don't know if the trees will even run much more after that they might just say they're done and then that'll be it it'll be wrap we'll just have to ride it out till the very end a couple more days but who knows if it freezes hard everything might come back to life and keep on going till middle of April well adding my divider plate cuz I'm only going to fill 10 barrels tonight so far we're at a half gallon a hole trying to get to 7 lb it's never happened in the Box for Maple history but it might happen this year yeah I don't know I think we have 100 drums left to fill which yeah if once it freezes if the trees keep on running there's a good chance we'll fill them all but I don't know we'll know more in a couple days but it looks like it's barely freezing and that's not going to be enough to get the sap going again good Zer degree day would help out the syrup is at 222 cuz someone started panicking and closed all the valves and made a rash decision instead of just hitting the button in the back of this to actually turn it on so then I wasn't paying attention and the syrup got too hot so now it's throwing off a little bit heavy but it's still extra light look how light that syrup is that's part of the reason why we bought a steam evaporator it makes pretty much all gold golden syrup this year it's a little backwards though I mean this year we made probably 100 barrels of golden this is my last hocan candy this is the last little piece I got to make more I couldn't resist order tonight and you'll have a fresh batch I've been started the boiler up about an hour ago now this is going to be the Second tub that's drawn off it always takes quite a while before it starts drawing off just like it has to heat up the whole system but once it starts drawing off it pretty much draws off just like that all night long when the boiler is running at Full Throttle and all the tubes inside the evaporator are clean this thing puts out about 300 gallons an hour hour and this year the nighter buildup hasn't been bad at all so this thing's been it's been putting out about 300 gallons all night long so it draws off into this tub We'll add the filter a powder in it and then we run it through the filter press but eventually the filter press can't keep up and sometimes I got to shut the boiler down and just pause for a minute it and let everything catch up so the filter press pumps it into this bricks tank where it constantly measures the density of the syrup and when the density is right on we put it in the barrels and then we got an overflow valve so when the Barrel's full it'll come out that second hose and it tells you the Barrel's full and then you just switch it shut the pump off switch it quick and continue on actually I can switch this over so as long as the syrup is between 66 67 and 1 12 bricks you can pump into the barrel if it's too thin the syrup could spoil and if it's too thick it'll form sugar crystals yep once it starts it doesn't stop it's actually getting hot got her said 225 and know I didn't have the valve closed for 5 minutes and then just opened it up I finally got the boiler tuned in it's actually good at drawing Off heavy just to thicken this up cuz it drew off way too light at first so it's actually right on right now let got to add more filter Aid just got to open a new bag of filter Aid it's called dious Earth so this white powder is the filter a and from what I understand it's basically ground up rock rock that's turned into dust and this actually acts as the filter this catches this helps catch all the sediment in the filter press without this powder you'd only be able to put maybe couple gallons through the filter press but we're able to get the most ever got through that 20in press was 39 barrels so I got to add about 4 gallons worth of filter aid for every tub I figure this is about a half gallon I use my drill to mix it up a lot of food processing plants use this di tomato Sur to filter food breweries [Music] wineries so now that this is mixed up I can start pumping it into the filter press so it's already the valve's already changed so that filter Aid goes into the press and it'll actually get caught in these plates so that filterate actually prevents the sediment from getting to the paper cuz once the sediment hits the paper it plugs the paper instantly so as long as you keep a good amount of filterate in it you'll get a lot of syrup through this you can see two of me now in the reflection well thanks for joining me I'll be here for another month I hope as long as it starts freezing other I'll only be here another couple days

Channel: Maple Farmer

Views: 20,749

Keywords: maple syrup, maple farm, maple farmer, Nikki Boxler, boxler maple, New York maple syrup, millennial farmer, agriculture, farming, farmer, farm, farm life, farming up north, winter farming, maple sap, maple trees, maple tree, sugar bush, maple sugar, maple syrup harvest, Vermont maple, Vermont maple syrup, Laura farms, tree syrup, natures syrup, welker farms, girl that farms, maple, real maple syrup, how to make maple syrup, tapping trees, how to tap a maple tree

Id: zaORDvaLJDM

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 10 2024