The First Run

 

As the afternoon suns streams into the kitchen, we finished bottling our first run of syrup which is called the Fancy grade. So light and lovely, this is the pure gold of syrup. We have collected 71 gallons of sap so far. We left partially boiled sap in the evaporator until we have collected enough to boil again. Today is cooler after a below-freezing night which will start the flow again. We look forward to a good week of sugaring.This is the best batch of fancy we have ever had. We are finishing the syrup on the kitchen stove rather than in the sugar shack so that we can get a more precise moment of finish using temperature, not specific gravity. We should be able to do a much better job this year with this technique.