Someone put me on to this article about Natunola which is a Biosciences company and manufacturing plant located in Winchester, Ontario. The idea is to change the sugar in maple syrup into “isomaltulose“. This product is already used in a number of low calorie beverages and food.
There are a number of different players in this Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affair, The National Research Council of Canada, University of Guelph Kemptville Campus Agroforestry Education and Research Center and Maple Ridge farms.
I hope they are successful and since the grant money is coming from the government of Ontario I expect that the patent will to free and open to everyone! But I am sure that will not be the case.
I am glad to have had a little break from the maple syrup season. Both Mike and I are sad that it is over but at the same time THANK GOD.
I had a great question from T. Miller a little while ago.
Any tips on starting the main lines would be great. My land is flat and I have been thining the crap trees out for a few years now.
Sorry it has taken so long to get back to you.
I would get your self something called a sugar bush transit. It is a little tool that tells you were where a 4% grade is. We did a little video of it a while ago, here it is again.
I would also say that you should get gripples and a gripple tool to tighten your lines:
and finally you need a wire tie twisting tool to attach the main line to your freshly run cable:
I would say those are the three main things that you need to start running your main line. Please let me know if it helps T.Miller.
I just wanted to put together a little post on our favorite evaporator to date. Yes she is very inefficient, yes she is warped, yes she is not 100% square but this pan and archway has so much character that we can’t help but love her.
Mike’s father is the only one who really knows the history of Burns and it is spotty at best, his memory is not what it use to be. As the story goes Mike’s Grandfather was using a very old style flat pan with no channels in it. Burns was custom made by someone in Sault Ste Maire. She is a three channel flat pan made out of 1/4 stainless steal.
The reason we call her Burnsie is because of how much wood she burns. This pan is so inefficient that we can’t possibly produce Maple Syrup for the market on it. The Days of old wood fired maple syrup are going to be a thing of the past.
There are however very fun facts about running Burnsie.
If you burn the pan it is no big deal – When I tried to run the pan with 3/4” of sap in it the first time I started it up I burnt the pan pretty good. The nice thing is that you can use a grinder to get it clean again. Try that with a delicate raised flu pan1.
It is easy to Run – Once you get a few inches of sap in her there is pretty much nothing that can go wrong2. No floats to jam up, no pipes to check on. Just keep the level high and the fire hot!
The Syrup is AMAZING – If I had my choice I would love to run this pan all day and I am sure that Mike would agree with me. The syrup is so thick and rich it is hard to describe, it like what maple syrup tasted like half a century ago. Mike calls it his Grandfather’s maple syrup.
This year we made a special batch 6 which took a ton of wood and over 2 days of boiling. I don’t know if we are going to run it next year or not but hopefully we get the privilege.
Thank you Alain for your comment the other day about getting one of these old pans for yourself. I would love to know more about it like how many channels does it have and what size it is? Chances are you will have a blast making syrup on it. If your really ambition you might even use it for a couple of years if you don’t break your back feeding it thousands of man hours of fire wood.
But I bet you it will be the best Maple Syrup you have ever tasted.
1 – please don’t do this for any reason! 2 – never say that within ear shot of your evaporator.
Mike and I have official called it the end of season. This year was amazing we learned a lot about maple syrup and we have both decided to do it again in 2012. Mother nature gave us 14 batch this year which we are both exited about.
Our first day of boiling for 2011 was March 13 and Our last day of boiling was April 22 for a total of 40 days of boiling.
We both want to thank everyone for showing up and lending a hand.
First our syruper of the year Spencer Cain
Also my parents Chuck and Peggy and Mike’s parents Roger and Wendy.
Thanks to the Cyborg Johnny and Julie.
Bill, Joe, Kristen, Pops, Katelyn, Lex, John Cain, Travis, Curt and Ashely, Dan and Adrian, Linus, Byron and Donna
Also thanks to Dave Stadnyk and Keith Brown for giving help and advise when we really needed it.
It looks like the season is coming to a close for us this year. We have run out of firewood and are not able keep making maple syrup this year. We went though almost 30 cord of wood this year which is all the dry firewood we have.
We were able to get 11 batches so far and we are going to finish up batch 12 as soon as possible. We still have about 2 cords of wood left so we might try and get a 13th batch out, we will see how it goes.
The weather in over the last little while has been bad to say the least. There were a few days this spring that felt just like summer and now it feels like a dreary fall day. That is one of my favorite things about being in the bush during spring, you get to see all the changes in the season first hand, without the insects.
Hey out there. Going though a lot of sap over the last 24h. We are Still running Chuck and Burns at the same time. Trying to catch up to everything.
At the same time John and Spencer came up with the idea that we had to be able to watch hockey while we are boiling. Well it took some rigging but now we have a COLOUR TV in the sugarshack. It only gets two channels CBC and CTV, channel 2 and 5.
Playoffs in the sugar shack, can you get anymore Canadian?
Since I have been here a lot of things have happened in the world. Not the least of which is the election we find ourselves in. I am now going though the process of voting by mail as I can’t really go all the way back to Davenport to vote. Seems kind of pointless as I think I am going to formally abstain anyway but I’ll jump though the hoops none the less.
Here are some pics installing a new element to our media arsenal and some other shots around the place.
We have too much sap right now. This sounds like a good thing but we can’t possibly evaporate all of it. Sap doesn’t last forever it goes cloudy and sour after a few days of sitting in above freezing tempratures.
Since it is about 14˚C outside the sap will go bad even faster so it is a race against the clock.
So we have fired up Burns to preheat the sap and feed it to Chuck. This means that batch 9 is going to be a double wood fired batch.
Chuck and Burns making double fired
There is no snow left in the bush at all but people have been saying the ground is still frozen so who knows how much longer we have to collect sap.
Well it has been a long time in the making but we have just finished batch 6 and 7 today. For those of you who love that super rich maple flavor batch 6 is for you on the other hand batch 7 is a very thick medium batch.
Batch 6 was made completely with Burnsie, our old flat pan, Batch 7 was made completely with Chuck our flue pan. Equipment has a lot to do with the type of product you produce. Batch 8 will be a mixture of both Burns and Chuck.
Double wood fired maple syrup!
Batch 6 boiling away
waiting until the temperature is a 190 to run though the filter
We are currently in the Sugar Shack boiling away drawing off some syrup. These are some picture from earlier today. We are still very backed up with the amount of sap we have to go though so we are burning all of Mike’s good wood while he is at work.
Sap pans boiling
near syrup bubbling away
Today Spence and I are turing these big blocks of wood
Here are some pics we took over the past couple of days.
Batch 6 is going to be a little different, Burnsie is really inefficient. We have noticed a huge difference using the flat pan compared with the new style flu. 14h of boiling and we went though 50 gallons of sap. That is not sustainable!
Chuck is 4h for the same. So by that line of logic batch 6 should be around $89.25 a bottle. LOL
Cheers
Out of the Darkness come the the sugar shack Zombie! Uhh uhhhh Draw off at 7, urrrrr urrr, top tank level, maaaaaaaaa pllllllllllllllllll
