The sugaring season is over for my parents. The trees stopped have stopped producing, even though it has seemed like weather for good runs, and the buckets have been taken down.The final take for this season was over 5 gallons (or, more impressively, 40 pints) from 17 taps. There was a wide variance of colors, as this picture shows, but it all tastes great.
Between now and next season, we hope to figure out how to keep more heat in the evaporator, and less in the stack. We're using a simple barrel stove setup, as shown in a previous post. After the first boiling session, which seems rather inefficient, my dad installed a damper and a baffle which helped quite a bit. However, the stove pipe goes through two clay thimbles as it exits the shack, and the outer one still gets way too hot to touch.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Great glad you had a good season . We are at about 25 gal and the sap just keeps coming . We don't worry about the smoke pipe getting to hot . If there is a four foot flame out the top of the pipe things are going good . Maybe there is a shortage of wood where you are?
ReplyDeleteIt isn't much a matter of wood supply, more a matter of speed of water removal. One of the old maples seems to get blown over every year, giving a pretty good quantity of firewood (fortunately, my dad has been planting new ones over the years, and the ones he put in 25 years ago are about ready to tap). I just don't think we could make the fire much hotter without various parts starting to fail (but perhaps I'm wrong), and if we could put more of the heat into the sap and less up the stack, we could make syrup faster.
ReplyDeleteI've been investigating flue pans...