Clean Clean Clean
Anyone who has done Maple Syrup will tell you that the most important and time consuming thing you have to do is Clean EVERYTHING. The cleaner you can make anything that sap or syrup touches the better the maple syrup will be.
Bacteria is the enemy and one that must be conquered though constant vigilance. Once you have everything clean the trick is to clean again. Than when it is really clean you should clean some more. Last year we used so much water that the Mikes well went dry and started to cave in on itself. This year should be different as we are going to be making our own hot water using our big evaporator so hopefully we won’t run into this problem again.
We have been getting some pretty warm weather in the last little while. Plus temperatures during the day for the most part, it is way to early for this stuff we are not quite ready yet. I don’t think we are going to be convinceing mother nature to hold off on her time table, if she says jump you jump.
Tapping time in Cincinnati
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. I guess they tap some pretty small tress down there.
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!”
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
Dialed in – 2010
Well it is starting to get a bit colder these days, November is right around the corner and that means snow is not far away. I use to hate this time of year, the long winter was just around the corner and it seemed there was nothing to look forward to until July and August when you could finally go swimming again.
That was before I caught the maple syrup bug, now I look forward to winter because it means we are only a few months away from spring ( I know I am jumping the gun a bit).
It also means that the holidays are just around the corner which is a busy time for maple syrup gifts of the season. For now I am just waiting until the first snow before I start thinking of that.
Until then I am going to be thinking of having the operation dialed in.
When everything is running just right we call it being dialed in. The wood fire is perfect. The temperature of the concentrate is slowly rising. The flow into the evaporator is set just right to match the steam coming off the rolling boil . The temperature outside is in the magic zone. But best of all someone else is splitting firewood.
A new member of the family
Mike and I are very happy to announce that we have a new Maple Syrup Producing buddy. This is our 14’ x 4’ Lapierre / Waterloo / Smalls Evaporator. This is quite a step up from our little flat pan and Mike and I are very exited about getting it rigged up.
The reason it took so long to get this thing out of the truck were these stupid little wheel wells which sat about 4” off the bottom. They where a constant battle with all the equipment, let that be a lesson for renting a 26’ Uhaul.
We had a great time picking it up in Owen Sound, driving down to Tobermory and making the crossing to ManitoulinIsland on the fabled ferry Chi-Cheemaun.
Here is a little video of our first born, Cheers:
Thanks to Roger Garside for helping up get this as quickly as we did.
Song “St. Joe’s” by The Dave Chapman Relief Fund.
The New Bloor Street Festival – 2010
I had a great time at The New Bloor Street Festival this year. It being the first year I did not really know what to expect. I wanted to get a place right on the corner of Russet and Bloor right above Hair Wave where our old apartment was.
It was great to talk to some of the people in the neighborhood. When I was living up north I didn’t know that there was a community in Toronto, I always thought that people kept to themselves and were distant to each other. Dominic at Hair Wave was, I think, the first person to teach me how vibrant and friendly Toronto can be. It was sad to hear that he would be closing his doors only one week after the festival was finished, after being there for 31 years.
The New Bloor Street Festival was put on by two great chaps Dougal Bichan and Sid Bruyn. I watched them running back and forth all day long organizing every little detail. There were also lots of great volunteers helping out. They did an amazing job and I can’t wait until next year. I wonder if they will still call it “New”?
We also had a chance to chat with some amazing people at the Starving Artist Waffle Booth. If there is one thing on the planet that goes perfect with maple syrup, it is waffles. We provided them with some of our very special Dark Syrup and it seemed to be a real hit.
There were ton’s of interesting people stopping in to say hello. One of them was a member of the Toronto Beekeepers Co-op of Toronto. They told me about a really cool plan to tap the trees in the parks of down town. Dufferin Grove park, right near my apartment, has about 20 or so really nice sized Sugar Maples most of them double or triple tappers. I think it is an amazing idea! The more sweat nectar of the gods we can get the better. This year they were able to tap silver maples and red maples but the city would not let them tap any of the sugar maples. Kind of makes you scratch you head but……. there you go.
All in all it was a great time and it gave me a chance to talk Maple Syrup with everyone who wondered by.
Jesse and the sugarbush
Jesse was a great big help this year in the Sugar bush. Mike and I were really happy to have him pull such a long haul. I think Mike was the happier one of the two of us as he had been living in the sugar shack night and day for almost two weeks before we showed up.
Running and evaporator efficiently is no small task, it may seem like nothing is happening but you have to keep things “dialed in” or you loose your fire, flood the pan or burn the syrup. There are also strange things that can happen when you least expect them. Check out this vid of Jesse dealing with something called a steam lock. This happens when the sap in the pre-heater boils causing the pressure to block the flow of sap.
Extrator pump breaking
Hello
Happy syrup making to everyone. We are indeed making maple syrup this year! Our first batch that was pulled of turned out to be about 20L, not bad for about 3 days work. I have been pretty sick after getting back from the Island and when I finally was feeling better I had to get back to work in a big way.
I did get a chance to upload a few videos on to youtube before I started feeling under the weather. I think this particular video captures the essence of what maple syrup production is like, well at least when things start to break. Mike and I have been bumbling around with some of the new equipment as we can’t really test anything until the sap started to flow.
Here is a quick little video of what happens to an extractor pump when you put to much oil in it.
Enjoy!
First time Firing
It has been a very productive weekend in the bush. We started a very detailed log book to record all the events both good and bad. It is going to take a while to get use to how what to record but It will help us with a lot of our planning and also writing these posts.
We started up the evaporator on Friday night. The pan that we are using is a deep flat pan, not a flue pan. Because I had the most experience with the evaporating I was the first to fire it up. I decided to run the pan with a 1/4” of liquid in it to start, needless to say I burnt the pan pretty bad and pretty quick.
That was not the only problem we had with the evaporator. We also are trying to fuel it with Bass wood. It was pretty damp and really did not burn all that well, because of this we have renamed it Ass wood.
Steam is also one of the big problems that we had to overcome. Our custom hood worked pretty good at channeling the steam but the real problem came from not having it at the right angle. It was blowing steam right into the faces of the operator rather than to the back of the pan an out of the shack. The hood also did not really come down far enough so we draped towels over it to keep the stream contained. We have it dialed in pretty good now.
More to come on how the bush is running and what happened over the weekend.
sugar shack
I have had an amazing weekend up at the sugar bush. Mike has done so much work up there it blows my mind. When I arrived all the runs were completed, all the drops were in. We have a new count of 400 taps. I am incredibly happy.
That being said there was still a ton of stuff to complete in the sugar shack. You would not believe the hours we put in! Because I did not post anything all weekend I thought that I would put together a video that shows the whole processes we went through when building the sugar shack, enjoy.
I would also like to say thanks to Al for posting the information about the different maple syrup festivals that are taking place. If I hear of any more I will let you know. You check out the full list he has here.
Royal Winter Fair 2009
This was the first year that I decided to check out the Royal winter fair held in Toronto. I would have never gone if it was not for my sister who was taking care of the Guelph booth at the show, thanks Sis. It gave me a chance to see some of the different farmers in Ontario and was a really interesting experience. I have never really been interested in farming growing up, I was always looking forward to getting out of the small town and into the big city. The Royal winter fair kind of was the best of both world.
I talked to all the maple syrup producers at the show, everyone had great insight and was very helpful. Two booths let really talk their ear off and even let me shoot some video. The first was from White Meadows farms. Richard was really nice and gave me some great tips on maple candy making. It turns out that they won best maple candy at the show last year so I am sure he knows what he’s talking about.
Next I had a chance to talk to Tracy Moore at Everything Maple. I have talked about her in an earlier post. She really went through everything with me and was happy to do so. She even gave me a few books to about packaging maple syrup. The great thing was the she knew all of the maple syrup producers from the island. You can really tell in the video that she is passionate about what she does. It was great to get to know other members of the Ontario maple syrup community outside of the island.
Now I know that the winter fair was a months ago but I have not had a chance to get everything off the camera until last week. I also want to apologize for the shakiness of the camera and the strange viewing angles. It was pretty loud and I wanted to make sure I got the sound I needed. Anyway, now that I have built it up, please enjoy.
Happy New Year
It has been far to long since I have written about maple syrup. To tell the truth have been pretty busy. I mean, I always use that as an excuse but I really was pretty busy over the holidays. I had a huge flash site to develop please check it out, funcheez.ca. Cheese shaped like dinosaurs and planets, pretty cool stuff.
Anyway I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who purchased maple syrup over the holidays It is really going to help this year. It really pumped me up for next Christmas. I guess I have a few different times of year to look forward to. Next year it would be great to have store front of some sort, I bet I could really make a go of it.
I also made a few batches of maple candy, I am 1 for 3 right now and I think I know what happened last time. I let the candy get way to cold before I put it in the mold. I have not yet recorded how to make maple candy on video yet as I don’t want to look completely inept at the process. We will wait until I can look really professional.
I have found the time to put together another little video from that last time I was up North. It is a quick little show of what our evaporator looks like and how it will work. It might look a bit weird because we have one pan stacked on top of another to keep it out of the way. I assure you It will do the job this season when the sap starts flowing. I hope that you enjoy it and have a safe and pleasant new year.
sap to syrup edit
Hello Everyone
Recently I found an online video on how to make maple syrup eggnog. I seemed like a nice enough recipe but what really got me was the fact the presenter was using fake maple syrup.
I decided to dub over the real ingredients that she was using, enjoy.
Remember there is no substitute for real maple syrup!
Videos – marking trees and mainline
I posted two videos a few day ago of mike and I running around in the bush marking trees and putting up main lines.
As I said I would here they are
Enjoy.
Marking Trees
Marking Main lines
Boiling it down
Do you wonder why maple syrup is so expensive? Well the reason that it’s so expensive is because a great deal of energy goes into making it. Below is a video that shows exactly how much wood it takes when you fire boiler. We fire one side of the boiler at the time this way there’s minimal heat loss.
we put about that much wood in the archway every 15-20 minutes, that means that we are firing the boiler every 7-10 minutes. This is of course depending on the different types of what and how dry it is. This year was a bit of a disaster as we ran out of wood and had to spend some of the time burning some not so dry popular.
Mike stumbled across a great website called http://www.woodheat.org This website is full of information in regards to firewood. My favorite part of the website is the energy per air dried cord or in thousands of BTUs. This gives a list of the most efficient types of firewood to use.
I thought that the best wood to use was iron wood, I might have the wrong name for it though. As I can’t find it anywhere in Ontariotrees.com. it’s very dense wood that doesn’t grow very large, it has kind of a flaky bark as he gets older. Maybe somebody can help me. The bark looks a bit like Black Ash when it’s older, but I don’t think that’s right.
Spiles
There always seems to be new innovations out that say they are going to increase production and save the industry thousands of dollars. This blog post is dedicated to Alan at globurban.com. He sent an amazing list of all the different maple syrup festivals that are going to be happening around Ontario, thanks Alan.
Alan had great question about spiles and pointed me into the direction of the University of Vermont website. Apparently there has been a new innovation called to check valve spout. It works like this if the vacuum system is turned on than a little ball that’s inside of the spiles is pulled away from the tree allowing the sap to come out. When the vacuum system is turned off the little ball rolls in front of the opening and blocks bacteria from getting back to the hole. Alan’s concerns seem to be that you’d put excess pressure on the tree by not letting the natural bacteria seal the hole thus taking more sap than the tree is able to lose. Read the full story here.
We will see if this spile will even work this year. I suspect if you are going to try new product that says it’s going to take more sap from the tree then a producer would tend to under tap.. Most of the syrup produces that I’ve talked to basically baby their bush, if there is something that has the potential to take more sap out of the tree I’m sure it would be tried in moderation. I’m sure it was the same when they came out with a vacuum system. If it works for these innovators than I am sure it is going to catch on.
There’s also been a number of innovations that tried to solve this bacteria problem. Leader Evaporators, which is the company that is selling these new spiles, already has something on their website to try to combat the problem of bacteria.
“designed to be an inexpensive bacteria free throw-away fitting to put in the tree for maple sugar makers looking for maximum production every year. This rugged extension features a female cup which will accept almost every 19/64 and 5/16 diameter spout on the market”
So will this new little device work, who’s to say? There is also another type of this spile that we are looking into for our bush, it is a stainless steel spile. Here’s a video of Bill Smith and Keith Brown discussing it.
Gorden Lightfoot – Love and Maplesyrup
Found a nice video on youtube. At the beginning of the video it looks like they are filming birch trees rather than sugar maples but you be the judge. I remember going to seeing Gorden Lightfoot in Orillia it was a great concert but I am not the biggest fan. Orillia was also a bit of a drag, we got into a bar fight with these guys we were hanging around with all night. They seems great at the time but when they had a few too may they went off. But I digress, enjoy.
Lyrics Download.
