First Batch of Maple Syrup for the Year!

Today we finished off and canned up our first batch of maple syrup from what we collected the other day.   The season is just getting started.  Today we ended up with 11 and 1/2 pints of finished syrup.   Early batches of syrup like this are very sweet, and not too heavy a maple flavor.   The maple flavor increases as the season progresses, and the syrup becomes slightly less sweet.   We like to sell something somewhere in the middle of the season.   This first product is what we keep for ourselves and to give away.  We did not get freezing temps last night, so the sap didn't run today.   But tonight the weathermen are predicting a good freeze, so tomorrow we should be able to collect quite a bit of sap.   We discovered that this year's ratio of sap to finished product is about 32 to 1, instead of 40 to 1.    This ratio varies from year to year.   Our neighbor claims his ratio was 28 to 1.  It is hard to calculate the exact ratio. 

Pancakes tonight for supper!!

Eleven pints of finished maple syrup!

A close-up of one of the jars.    This first batch was only filtered through an orlon filter and 3 pre-filters.  Normally we filter through all this, PLUS a wool filter, but I didn't want to dirty the hard-to-clean wool filter just for this small batch.  Filtering through all three kinds of filters produces a very clear product, much clearer than this one.

Tomorrow's sap collection will be much easier on us.   We got a large amount of rain the other evening, and some temps in the upper 50's, so a lot of the snow melted.   In the woods, the snow is probably only 6 inches deep now.   We can handle that!