The month of February was the warmest on record since official records began for the Twin Cities. We have had occasional nights of near freezing temperatures so the trees are stimulated to produce sap that day. We notice, however, that the volumes diminish after a couple nights of this. We have made over 15 barrels of syrup in a time period that we typically don‘t even collect sap!

Today’s temperature is nearly 70 degrees so we are processing it as fast as our equipment will allow so that the sap will not degrade in quality.At these temperatures you should process the same day as collected unless you have a way to cool down the sap like we do with refrigerated bulk tanks.

We hope that the meteorologist is correct that we will have a string of sub freezing nights so that the trees can recharge and produce more sap. We shall see!

We continue to experience record warmth for February and meteorologists predict the warmest February since the start of record keeping. The days have included considerable sunshine and warmups in the 40s occur before noon! We find the sap flowing beginning about 10 am and continuing until after sunset.

 We try to get our vacuum system reaching 25 inches but have thus far been unsuccessful. We have gotten it to 20 , however we know that every 5 inches of vacuum pressure,increases yield by 25% over gravity systems. Therefore, we achieve a 100% increase at 20 inches vacuum but still are giving up another  25%. We occasionally find a leaking line due to squirrel bites or a loose spile. Every repair helps but they seem to continue!

 We have fired up the evaporator 4 times so far , and nearly 100 gallons of delectable syrup has been made. And this is still before we historically even see the sap run!

We have collected 1500 gallons of sap in the last 24 hrs and are concentrating it through our RO. Our sap is running 2.2 % sugar ( rather typical for our sugarbush). The RO is concentrating this to 10-11% which means we only need about 8.5 gallons of this concentrated sap to make a gallon of finished syrup. If we didn’t use the RO, it would take about 40 gallons of sap! A great savings of time and energy consumption!

Check back in a few days to see how we did!

Temperatures for the last week have remained in the 40s and 50s, setting records in the Minneapolis region. As we added taps and repaired lines each day, we painfully watched the sap pour on the ground at the lower collection tank, until we could install our mechanical releaser and attached vacuum pump. We consistently saw 2-3 drops per second from the majority of taps, not just those on the warm, south side of the tree, which would have been consistent for the early season. 

Our sugar concentration in the sap was 1.8% to 2.1%, quite typical for our sugarbush . We collected sap for 3 days, until we had 2200 gallons . By then, the reverse osmosis machine was installed which removed 75% of the water from the sap, thereby saving 75% of the energy and time to boil the sap into syrup. We cleaned our evaporator one final time by filling it with water and brought it to a roring boil.

We made our first batch of syrup ,a light grade color on February 7th, the earliest syrup has been made  in 31 years.!  The previous years were 2002 and 201- the third week in February!

Many surprises already, and the "regular" syrup season hasn't even started!!