A Good Sap Run

Yesterday was warm and sunny -- something that's been rare these past weeks -- so Catherine and I stopped by her brother Fraser's sugarhouse to see how the sap was running.  Turns out it was running pretty well, as the video clip below shows.  What you're looking at is the vacuum collection chamber (my term...not sure what Fraser calls it); the pumps maintain a vacuum in the chamber and sap runs in (the clear pipes on the left) until the chamber is almost full.  Then the chamber is sealed off from the smaller chamber on the left, and the drain opens at the bottom to let the sap flow into the holding tank.

That's a lot of sap, but to put it in perspective, this tank is one of eight or so in Fra's sugarhouse, some (like this one) holding raw sap, some holding "concentrate" (sap from which a portion of the water has been removed via "reverse osmosis".)

Here's Fra's helper, Dylan, tending the rig; he's checking the density of the syrup he's drawing off into the square container.  The pipe inserted into the container is ready to pump the hot syrup out, through a set of filters and then directly into stainless-steel drums.

I didn't get a picture of the syrup window, but it's showing about double what we saw last week...a good start, but a long way to go yet before he'll have a full crop.  Fingers crossed.

Fraser gifted us with a quart of today's syrup in a Ball jar, at which point we decided we'd have some french toast for supper!

-- Bill Clark