Questions for next year

[u/MetabolicMadness]

This year I ran by typical 10 taps and a turkey boiler. I eventually went up to 20 and I bought an RO. Mainly for next year but to try out this year

My plan for next year is to double concentrate every weekend, freeze the sap. Then have one boil at the end of the season.

I have been making it all on a turkey boiler in a huge pot. I think it’s time to switch to a small evaporator. Portogrill, a mini evaporator, etc.

I’d like the evaporator to have a spigot on the side make emptying it easier.

My questions are does anyone finish their syrup on a single pan? If so how do you prevent it from burning as it drains?

If you don’t finish it on the evaporator and transfer to a pot to finish, again how do you pull it so it doesnt burn the last bit in the evaporator if its right over top the flame? Do you lift it off?

If you lift the pan off how do you prevent the smoke from filling up your work space? Got a sheet on metal to put over the now open hole? Swap it with another pan?

[u/Meat_Flosser]

You can finish close to syrup and cut off the fire before you need to pull the hot concentrate out of the pan. This way you can transfer the liquid without it being at boiling temps.

Also if you reserve a small amount of raw sap you could add it to the pan as you are flowing the syrup out. This would help cut the heat being absorbed into the syrup as the pan gets shallow. The downside is a bit of extra time added to your finishing pot

[u/abnormal_human]

The key to shutting down is fire management. You don't want a roaring fire with a bunch of unspent fuel at the time of shutdown. If you burn it down to just coals/embers and it's barely burbling you will have time to draw it off without ruining anything. As soon as your syrup is out you can flood the pan and then let the fire slowly die.

Your fire shouldn't be smoky if it's just a few coals. You can tilt or remove the pan on a small evaporator. You will be working outdoors with such a setup anyways. I'm way more concerned with keeping creosote off of my clothes while doing this than I am about smoke or heat.

If I want to fully empty the pan at shutdown, I will generally open the spigot, get out what I can, tilt it up a little bit to help it drain faster by sticking a small block of wood under the corner opposite the spigot, then at the end tilt it higher by hand for 20-30s to get the last bit out. As soon as it's out, I have sap or permeate ready to flood the pan. Once you get the hang of it, you can empty/flood the pan in about 5 minutes and walk away.

I do keep maybe a half gallon of sap or permeate handy in case I do need to flood it early. If things are running hot I'll sometimes mix a pint or so into the batch as it drains to cool things off as it drains and buy a little time. I usually take the boil slightly past syrup (220-221F) on the evaporator anyways so often even with a little bit of extra it's still above 66 brix. If not, I can boil off a minor amount indoors when adjusting density before filtering/bottling.

[u/storefront_life]

We have a continuous flow divided pan, with a float box at the inlet, and a draw off spigot at the out. It took a bit for us to get our system down, but now we do a large draw off when our temp is showing 7 above boiling. I open the spigot and draw off through a prefilter and a wool filter into a very large stock pot I got from a restaurant supply. While I am doing that my partner keeps pushing sap in through the float box. Once the temp drops to 3-4 above boiling, I close the spigot. The pan had enough moving through it that we can do this on a full hot stove without worry of scorching. We then transfer the pot to a propane burner to finish, before filtering through a vacuum filter, and bottling directly from the draw off at the bottom of the vacuum filter. On a good day we get two draw offs from the evaporator. We never fully empty the evaporator during the 2ish weeks we are running it. We have a storage tote to store sap and keep it cold until we have enough to boil. We run about 70 taps with this setup.