More.

More syrup and even more fun headed our way this past weekend.

We had a nice visit from Sarah and Gerry who were eager to help with the weekend festivities of boiling. Friday Gerry and I collected full buckets and started the evaporator. We let it go until about 2am when we called it quits. At 9am we were back in action to boil down the last of the sap, and by 3pm we were finishing the batch on the stove. Here Sarah gets pretty excited about finished syrup.

After filtering, Gerry decided he couldn't leave ANY syrup in the filters OR on the counter. We told him no, but he just didn't listen! I guess you dont want to waste any of this tasty goodness!

After bottling up the final product, Sarah and Becca had a successful run at "sugar on snow". It was really tasty. Below Sarah watches carefully with her candy thermometer getting the syrup to the perfect temperature to make the hard candy.

Below, Becca and Sarah taste the candy!

At the end of the day, we were left with just over a gallon of final syrup. That's 4 quarts in cans, plus the beautiful bowl of golden syrup we used for pancake breakfast!

This weekend my syrup was thicker and darker partly because I boiled the finished product for longer. The last two batches were technically finished syrup (7 degrees above the boiling point of water that day) but after talking with some local backyard sugaring experts, I understand that a hydrometer is what REALLY gets you to finished syrup. A hydrometer is a device that measures the density of a liquid. I picked one up this week and hope to try it out this weekend. Always in search of that perfect batch!

On Sunday we had a great visit from brother Tim and Sonny. Tim brought a few gallons of evaporated sap to the house to finish, filter and bottle. The beer was flowing, but we paid close attention to the precise work we were doing. The next few pics are of Tim and I filtering and bottling his final product!

Tim ended up with 3/4 of a gallon and was a V-E-R-Y happy camper.

Tim and I are both collecting this week like mad men in hopes to have a massive syrup bender this weekend. We hope to boiling down close to 100 gallons of sap. This could be reality as long as the cold nights and warm days stay with us. Lets hope things pick up towards the end of the week!

More later.