The sap is running and so are we! Sap appeared in Talkeetna area birches starting on April 9th. It will take our crew of seven hard workers four long, strenuous days to tap 10,500 birches. We just hauled in our first 1600 gallons of beautiful, clear sap! That means it’s going to get noisy around here with pumps pumping, pressure washers cleaning, reverse osmosis concentrating, and the evaporator boiling the sap to sweet, amber birch syrup.
It will be a continuous flow for about three weeks. Sap flows from the trees into buckets and lines; through the sap-suckers’ hoses or vacuum lines, then pumped through transfer lines into our truck tanks. Once delivered to “Birchworld” – our production facility – it is pumped through filters and metered into the big sap tank. From there it is pumped at high pressure through reverse osmosis, where the concentrated sap flows into the “concentrate” tank and then into the evaporator to be boiled to syrup. When it’s syrup it flows out the evaporator drawoff valve into a holding tank and through the filter press where it finally flows, as finished birch syrup, into storage pails to be bottled later at our production kitchen.
Watch this space for further updates and availability of 2018 harvest birch syrup. You don’t have to wait though; we have plenty of Reserve (first day) from 2016 and 2017 and all runs left from 2017. That’s it for now … I’m off and running!
The tank at Pumphouse 1 is filling up with the first sap of the season.