I ran accross this video on youtube of a couple of guys in Clough Pike Cincinnati, Clough Vally maple syrup. Seems they are all set up and tapped in for maple syrup season down south. Makes me a bit apprehensive as we are still not ready for production yet, I guess there are positives for living this far north.
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First Sap Run 2012
Yes the sap did run, we have proof. It has been a pretty mild winter so far and it seems the trees started up. Mike has two buckets on the trees just outside his house to test if that sap is running. So there you go, if we were tapped in and ready we “could” have made syrup.
So much to do, so little time..
first sap of 2012
Work Continues to begin
Well we are in the depths of winter right now and though it seems as if spring is a lifetime away we are still working feverishly to be ready. We have taken a large on a large amount of work with the new evaporator this year but Mike and I are confident that we are going to have everything ready to go.
Our main concerns at this point are making it easy to clean everything. Having Chuck the evaporator was pretty easy to deal with, one person could lift the whole pan and put it on the quad to clean it. Our new pan however is a different beast. We need a trailer to get it from point A to point B so I don’t foresee us moving it around during the season. The hood alone takes 4 people to take it off and it is heavier than you would think. So Mike and I have put some rigging up to make the job a bit easier.
We also dropped the height of our extractor and are building a better surface to keep it on.
We were also able to salvage some amazing speakers from the garbage pile which work great in the sugar shack. Last year we must have blown about 6 speakers as the stereo setup is not really thought out we simply found old broken speakers from one placer or another, plugged them in and turned the volume up as loud as we wanted. If they blew up we replaced them. The new speakers we found have not blown when we turned the amp up full blast so I think we found a winner.
It is also going to be nice there is not going to be as much moisture in the sugar shack because all of the steam is going to be piped right out the steam stacks and out of the building. Should make for a pretty amazing show, I can’t wait to get the boiling happening!
a picture from the new holes drilled thought the logs
Dave and Travis
More fun to come!
Stacks
Well, it’s that time of the year. Time to put up the Stacks in for the new evaporator. Not that there is a good time to do something like that. For those of you who have never put up a 13″ diameter stack 16′ up in the air it is not the most pleasant thing in the world. You might fall off the roof, you might drop the stack, you might crush your fingers the whole gambit of bad things.
We started by moving the big evaporator into position with the tractor. We used some good old tractor knowhow and placed it perfectly. We than put the stacks in up as high as we could on the inside of the building than proceeded to cut a rough hole in the roof. This was quite a delicate procedure as we already had 3 stacks coming out of the roof from last year. Our poor tin roof has started to look like a huge piece of swiss cheese patched with mismatched tin roofing on a ton of silicon.
Once we were ready for “the big lift” Mike and I move the 16′ of stack slowly up the side of the roof until we got to the peak. “All right lets lift it up”, I said wanted to get this over with as fast as possible. This was not about to happen as we just did not have the leverage or balance to get it done. Now for those of you who have significant others whom you love and love you, you know that they can sometimes separate themselves from a situation that could be potentially life threatening. We decided to come at if from another angle and set up an extension latter latched to the building with a rope leading though the highest rung back to the ground where Brianna could keep the stack from falling.
Now the moment had come, we had the stack upright on the roof ready to lift and put it into the already secured stack sticking out about 3 feet above the roof. Now any number of things could have gone wrong, fingers crushed, falling off the roof, being tangled in the safety lines or loosing the stack off the roof. On the count of 3, Mike and I lifted and place the stack perfectly. A few seconds of panic and we were solid! The engine now has an exhaust!
shot from the roof of the sugar shack
Down the Stack
it's a stack victory!
Stoke up the Fire!
A friend of mine just sent me this little video. Though it seems a bit early for most but not for us.
We have a friend coming up this weekend to work in the bush with us, I hope we don’t work him too hard.
“Stoke up the fire, it’s maple syrup time!”
And syrup season begins again!
Well there has been quite a bit of activity in the bush in the last little while. We have been working non stop for the past two weekends. We now have the evaporator in the building, nothing really hooked up yet but boy are we happy that there is no chance that a branch will fall on it. I can also tell Mike how I hit it with a golf ball as there does not seem to be any real dents or dings since we took it out of the uhaul.
We also tore everything out of the old shack, rebuild the floor and now our sugar shack will be much easier to keep clean.
We also spent some time organizing the hole in the universe known as “THE BROWN SHED”! That thing was an enormous junk pile. So now we know where things are for the most part which makes life that much easier.
Things are moving forward now, summer is over and it is time to Gear UP! Get it done!!!!!
looks good
Mmmmmm
SAP training not sap training.
Sap to syrup was contacted a little while ago by a company that does S-A-P training. They basically do training for a myriad of different clients. You can check out more of what they do at teksoftventures.com
They found us somehow in the online world and thought that it would be fun to use our product in the one of the commercials that they were shooting. Mike and I thought that would be a pretty cool and just today we received an email saying that the commercial was completed.
I think that the subject matter is very enlightening when it come to extracting sap from a maple tree. A very good seminar, but you be the judge.
flannel will never go out of style
New Maple Syrup Resources
I just recived an email from a new website called http://www.sugarbush.info.
This site was lauched “in an effort to list pretty much anything the Maple Syrup industry has to offer online.” So that sounds like a pretty Nobel cause and a resource that all maple syrup producers can use.
It is a pretty new site, launched in January 2011 but already they have over 500 listings of sugarbushs in both the United States and Canada.
This is definitely a site I am going to check out from time to time.
