This was my first time visiting Bourdon Maple Farm. They have 10,000 taps and use quite sophisticated technology to track the pressure along miles of tubing. They put several sensors out in the sugarbush that can report wirelessly to a computer in the sugar house on what the pressure here and there is. If pressure is very low- they can target where to go and check the lines (to see if a squirrel chewed through it or something).
The sap comes in and run through a reverse osmosis machine- to separate out filtered water from water-soluble solids (sugar, minerals, etc). The "sap concentrate" is what moves on to be boiled while the water is a by-product (re-used, in this case, to flush the system in the opposite direction). I've seen reverse osmosis machines in other sugar house and while they seem like an expensive investment, for high-production sugarmakers, I assume it eventually pays for itself with time and fuel saved.
Boiling the sap:
Sweet steam. My grandfather had a sugar house when I was little and the smell seriously brings back memories.
When the percentage of sugar is correct, the syrup comes off the boiler:
And run through a diatomaceous earth filter before being bottled or poured into a barrel- to remove any remaining sediment from the syrup. This part was super cool to me- I had never heard of it before.
I loved visiting this sugar house- the family running this business was so nice. They also had good homemade cookies out for the Open House. I bought a gallon before we left and now I'm ready to maple syrup all the things.
No comments:
Post a Comment