Winter is in full swing in the Harmony River Valley and we have been quite busy getting ready for the spring maple syrup season. Our building is nearly complete, with only a few things left to be wrapped up.
In order to manage the massive amounts of maple sap that we will collect in the spring, we have installed a combination of indoor sap tanks, cooling tanks and two silos. This will give us a capacity of 100,000 US gallons of raw and concentrated sap. Our silos were installed recently and they sure look nice!
The 16 vacuum pumps and 8 releasers have now been installed and tested and are ready for the spring sap flow! Our pumps and releasers are set up for up to approx. 200,000 taps, however, we expect we will have approx. 100,000 taps ready for the 2020 season.
Our evaporators are now installed and ready for maple syrup production. For our size of operation we chose to go with two of CDL's Master evaporators. These are propane fired evaporators and one unit could process up to 7.5 barrels of maple syrup per hour. Having two evaporating units not only allows us to process large amounts of concentrated sap, but also allows us to have redundancy built into our system in the event of maintenance during processing.
In order to save time, money and reduce our environmental impact we are installing two intelligent reverse osmosis machines from CDL. These units can process up to 14,000 gallons per hour of raw sap and can bring the sap up to 35 brix. Our reverse osmosis machines are being installed right now as well as all the stainless process piping.
This is an exciting time for us at Black Bird Management. We are looking forward to the 2020 maple syrup season.
Stay tuned for our next update!