Finished syrup at last!

News from the Sugarbush

First, the bad news: it looks like the season is probably coming to an end soon. We got some good temperature swings this week, but we didn't get very much sap. There's still time for that to change, and I'm determined to chase the season all the way to the end this year. But we had to cancel Saturday's boil because we didn't have enough sap, and that's likely to happen more frequently as the trees feel ready for spring. We'll be announcing any cancellations through this email list and through the Facebook page, so keep an eye out for those if you're planning to come down for a visit.

In better news, we were able to use the lack of boiling on Saturday as a chance to actually finish some syrup! We have a new filtering and canning system this year, and we're still figuring out how to use it. I completely forgot to take pictures, but I'll try to explain how it works:

During our sugarbush boils, we try to limit the concentrations in the pan 50-60% sugar. Finished syrup is around 67%. We pull it a little early because once it reaches those concentrations, it can sprint past the finish line surprisingly quickly, at which point it boils over and makes an enormous mess. Our biochar stove is fantastic at its job, but it's not something that lets you easily turn down the heat. So at the end of each day, we put the concentrated sap into half gallon jars, which go into the fridge until we're ready for a finishing boil.

This is where our new maple canner comes in. The nearly finished syrup goes in the canner, which can hold up to 8 gallons of concentrate. It has two high-wattage electric heating elements that are controlled by a thermostat. It can operate in two modes. In boiling mode, it heats the concentrate continuously to boil off the last few percentage points of water. In canning mode, it uses the thermostat to maintain the syrup at a particular temperature. We boiled until the syrup was showing 67% on our refractometer, and then switched to canning mode for the filtering process.

When we're filtering finished syrup, we have a few goals. The main one is to remove the niter, or sugar sand, which forms from mineral deposits that precipitate out of the syrup as it boils. It's safe to eat, but it can add a gritty texture and cloudy appearance to the syrup. Syrup starts to form sugar sand any time it's heated above 190°F. So we need to keep the syrup hot enough to go through the filter, but not hot enough that it keeps making sand after it's gone through.

This is where the new canner comes in. We can set the canner to 185°F and know that we'll end up with clear syrup on the other side. We have a special high-temp, food-safe pump that can pump the hot syrup from the canner and push it through a filter canister that includes both an Orlon pre-filter and a stainless steel mesh layer. From there, it goes into a separate pot to wait until we're ready for bottling.

This is our first season using a finishing filter, so we're still figuring out how everything works. We had a lot of issues with the filter clogging before we'd finished filtering a batch of syrup. But the syrup came out looking clear and beautiful, and it's nice to finally have some jars of finished syrup (and the space in our fridge back.)

Other News of the Commons

Dance for Democracy proved a little more exciting than usual this week, when a dipsh*t kid decided to throw a cup of soda at my head. Luckily for me, I was able to duck before it hit me. Unluckily for him, I wear a head-mounted camera at these sorts of protests for exactly this reason. Back in Colorado Springs, we regularly had to deal with the Oathkeepers or Atomwaffen Division showing up to our protests, often with AR-15s. I still carry combat-rated tourniquets to protests in case the worst happens. So it takes a lot more than a soda-throwing dumb@ss to scare me off.

I gave the cup, the 5-second video of the incident, and a series of stills showing his face and license plate number to the Montague Police Department, and I'll be interested to see if anything comes of that. In the meantime, if you happen to know this particular d!ckbag, it sure seems like he could use an elder who could teach him some conflict resolution skills before he gets himself in more serious trouble. If he'd hit a more easily-affrontable member of the crowd, he could be looking at assault charges right now.

In the Broader Movement

The Sierra Club is organizing a lobby day in Lansing on May 15th. It's a great opportunity to get some training and make an impact at the state level. Politicians know that only a tiny fraction of their constituents are ever going to bother driving all the way to Lansing to bug them at their offices. So when you show up and do that, they know that you probably represent a thousand or more constituents who agree with you but didn't want to make the drive. It's an incredibly effective form of activism, and a great opportunity to see how things work in the state legislature. Our local rep, Kurt Vanderwall, usually gets away with voting for Medicaid cuts and against hospital staffing requirements, because he knows most people don't pay attention at the state level. You can show him he's wrong about that. (And maybe throw away something smelly in his wastebasket while you're there 😈)

Solidarity This Week

Do you like the USPS? Do you think we should protect "unprofitable" rural mail routes that connect so many of our neighbors with the outside world? Do you want to learn some organizing skills? Why not help organize a local Hands Off USPS teach-in? A lot of folks around here haven't heard about the likely effects of post office privatization on rural communities like ours, and this is a great opportunity to spread the word. This is a national effort to hold 1000 teach-ins in 1000 different communities, and it's being put together by organizers I've worked with before and deeply respect.

Recommendation Corner

"Cancel Culture" can mean a lot of things these days. A lot of times it's used to mean "people in power being made to worry that they might eventually face minor consequences for abusing their subordinates". But it can also describe the very real tendency on the Left to go after our own, sometimes on the basis of very little information. Cancel Me, Daddy! is a podcast that looks at all the angles of cancellation in our society and tries to sort out the real patterns from the moral panic. They recently became a part of Flytrap Media, a worker-owned media group, and they're always one of my favorites when they come up in my podcast feed.

This Week's Nails

You've reached the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! For new subscribers, I usually type this newsletter up while I'm doing my nails for the week and waiting for various coats of nail polish to dry. Right now I'm on week 3 of a swatching project, where I'm painting little sample dots with each color of nail polish that I own so that I can stick them on the bottle caps and have a better sense of what each one actually looks like when I'm choosing my polishes for the week. To break it up into more manageable chunks, I've been doing 10 per week and giving myself a multicolor "skittle" manicure at the same time. At this rate, I'll have everything swatched in three or four months. (And yes, I do own entirely too much nail polish. But every town should have a strategic sparkliness reserve ✨)