What a month we’ve had, it feels like March weather! We started tapping on February 6th and currently have 19,680 taps in, only 3,000 left to go. Due to the warm temperatures we’ve been leak checking heavily while tapping. We want as little oxygen in the lines as possible during these warm days to slow tap hole healing. We’ve boiled twice so far and made 1,400 gallons of amber/golden syrup!

This post is a little late but last month we prepped all of our taps with new spouts while fixing damaged lines. This month we’ve been hard at work tapping! While we’d love to have 100% of our taps in for this sap run we’re not too worried, the trees we tap last will produce more sap later in the season and should offset the early season days they’ve missed.

This summer we replaced our single 45 gallon draw off tank with a new 2×90 gallon tank on wheels. In the past we would try to keep around 30 gallons of fresh syrup in the tank, but inevitably our filter press would not keep pace with the evaporator. This new tank will quadruple our volume and give us two separate holding areas. The second section will come in handy while we’re cleaning one press (remember back in August we posted about our second filter press). Section A can continue to fill with hot syrup for the primary press while section B holds hot condensate to rinse the clogged press. The extra capacity buys us time in case we get distracted, the last thing we want is an overflow!