Since our last update, the weather has been very favorable for the last few days - lows in the 20's, and highs in the 40's. The warming sun has made it pleasant to be in the woods, and encouraged the trees to begin giving up sap by mid-mornings. We have been obtaining over 1 gallon of sap per tap per day (we have 1200 taps).
All of our syrup has been a rich and delicious dark robust flavor. Under the older classification, this would be "dark amber". Our sap remains consistent at 1.8% sugar concentration, which means it takes approximately 43 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup.
We are able to concentrate the sap further than 1.8% through our reverse osmosis (RO) machine to 8%. While this may seems a modest improvement, it actually means 75% of the water is removed. The savings in time and energy equals 75% as well. Instead of being able to make about 3 gallons of syrup per hour, we can bump it up to 11 gallons!
We are keeping pace with our production of last year, and hope for continued good flows for several more weeks.
Thanks for reading our post, and we'll update later in the week.