What a year it’s been already. Between favorable weather, some incredible employees, all of the experience gained over the last few seasons, and a little luck with equipment not breaking (mostly), we’re on pace for a record year. As of Friday’s boil (1206 gallons made) we’re at 66% of last years crop. With the sap hauled today plus what’s in our tanks/evaporator we estimate we have another 900 gallons worth, which would put us at 85%. Let’s hope this March is like last years and the sap keeps flowing!

We never had a chance to post pictures of our new Reverse Osmosis (RO) room! Our previous room was 65 square feet with a 7′ ceiling, our new one is 200 square feet with 11′ ceilings. Everything about the new setup is an improvement from before, much easier to run/modify and clean. We’ve also added a ninth vessel and replaced three aging membranes with high brix ones. Our sap has been coming in around 1.3-1.5% sugar so far this year, we’ve been sweetening it up to 20% on one pass with the old eight membranes before chilling. This week we’ll experiment going to 25%+ with the extra vessel and new membranes. Next up we may replace one or two more of the other aging membranes and potentially reconfigure the high pressure pumps for more throughput.

Yesterday we broke our daily production record and made 1040 gallons of maple syrup off one boil, that’s 26 drums! We actually had another 300 gallons of syrup worth of sap/concentrate but since our chiller is up and running we decided to call it quits after ten hours of boiling. We’re currently hauling the last of our sap before the upcoming freeze and will boil again later this week. We should make another 700-1000 gallons and should be somewhere between 2200-2500 before March 1st! Check out this time lapse Lauren took from the first few hours