This season essentially started in late summer with the construction of our new sugar house, and continued through our last boil on April 4th. In the final preparation stages, right before we started actually collecting sap, there where a bunch of marathon sessions. Things started to get pretty real as I was plumbing in the RO, test firing the evaporator and trying to wrap up everything in the woods.

Our first boil we intentionally used non-concentrated sap to see how the machine would run in a nice slow manner. Without concentrating sap, we would get around 4 gallons of syrup an hour, vs the ~30 gallons per hour running concentrate…

Our first draw was about 1/2 gallon of beautiful light syrup, definitely a positive indicator of things to come.