Three and a half gallons!

Three and a half gallons . . . the amount of maple syrup we have made in the last month. Which is almost three times as much as we made last year, and twice as much as we made the year before that. I think it can mostly be attributed to a longish season with several bouts of near perfect sap run weather. The biggest sap run we had: Tuesday, March 8 we gathered 14 almost 15 gallons of sap from 5 trees in 24 hours or less. Over the season, we figured we gathered over 108 gallons of sap, which works out to a little less than 20 gallons of sap per tap (one of our trees had 2 taps). That's a lot for our itty, bitty sugarbush. 

That's a lot of jars lined up on our kitchen table (or other places to catch the sunlight). It ranges from color from light amber to dark amber, and from crystal clear to slightly cloudy. While we could still be collecting sap, using a propane burner limits our season because of the cost of propane.  This past weekend we hit our propane purchasing limit, and so boiled off our last batch of 2011 on Sunday.  Though I don't think we'll see much of if any sap runs after today or tomorrow, with warming night time and day time temperatures. And the trees will start to break open their buds meaning "buddy" sap, which doesn't make very good syrup.

On Sunday, we could already tell that the quality of the sap had change. Our syrup produced that day wasn't as crystal clear as other ones, and when I poured it through cheese cloth to filter it, we got a thick layer of sugar sand.

Which is minerals and other stuff that settles out of syrup, and that can be filtered out almost completely if you have a sophisticated filtering system. We don't have a sophisticated filtering system yet, just cheesecloth over a sieve. This is the only batch we got that much sugar sand out of; in most of the other batches you'll just see a thin film of it on the bottom of the jar. So if you see a grayish or light brown film on the bottom of a jar, no worries that's just the sugar sand. When you hit it when you're pouring out your jar, you've hit the bottom. The few drops of syrup left will be gritty and not worth using.

By the way did you see the sunset last night? It was a beauty (my photo editor enhanced the colors a little more than I like, but it really was almost this bright in some spots).