For starters Michael had collected 165 gallons of sap on Tuesday, so that was enough to keep us busy for quite a while. It also helped when the front pans started boiling about half an hour after Dad got the fire started. That's a lot longer than it used to take with the gas burner, but less time than it took for our first try with this rig and wood.
Then the downhill part: About an hour or so later we had the first batch come off, but the temperature went way up to 230 degrees and we were afraid we had burned it. At the least it was going to be way beyond syrup, or too dense. After another batch came off the same way we decided to lower the set point temperature of the drawoff from 221.1 to 220 and see if that kept the temperature from going so high. We figured it would be better to have to finish it a little longer than take a chance on burning it or having to thin it while finishing.
So we set the temperature to 220, and it was much better, we were even able to keep it fairly consistent and have batches come off over long periods of time.
Early in the afternoon we went out to collect and after two trips we had 225 gallons. We over-filled the tank and had to leave four full buckets out in the woods while we came back to empty. Most of the bags were around 3/4 full which is much better than having them completely full...they get a little hard to handle without soaking yourself.
After that it was pretty uneventful, we just kept things boiling and ended up with around 7 gallons or so. I had to leave early so Dad stayed and kept boiling; I talked to him around 8:3o and he was just removing the hot coals from the firebox so he could go home. That gave us a total boiling time of around 13 hours.
Fire at the end of the day
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