Exciting developments at the Ohio State University-Mansfield campus! We installed a teaching maple evaporator under our new pavilion near the research sugarbush and just completed our first boil last night. This step is fairly monumental for Ohio State Maple, and there isn’t anything quite like the feeling of seeing that first draw-off. Somehow we’ve got a grainy image of that moment last night to commemorate the experience!
First things first – a formal thank you to Roger and Suzie Gortner for continuing to do our production sap processing. They have made exceptional maple syrup from our OSU trees for the past 5 years and will continue to be instrumental in that regard. We literally could not do it without them, and we’re grateful that it’s an arrangement that works for both parties involved.
But now for the first time ever, we have our own evaporator. No, it is not sized to keep up with a production woods of almost 1,200 taps, but it is perfectly sized for demonstration boils on a teaching scale. With help from local producer Galen Smith from Mount Vernon, OH, our team set up an 18” x 66” drop flue evaporator early in winter of 2023-24. After a test boil to dummy out a few variables (or maybe to dummy out the dummies…us!?), we put fire under sap concentrate on Wednesday, February 14th – Valentine’s Day.
Four 5/16″ lines kept sap flowing from our larger sap tank into a holding chamber that our reverse osmosis unit was drawing off. We adjusted the PSI on our RO to almost perfectly sync and match the raw sap movement with our RO processing speed. After some adjustments to align the 2 processes, we were taking sap from 2.1 to 4.6 Brix concentrate. 6 hours later, we were halfway there…
Eventually, we crept up to 7 degrees F over the point of boiling water. You know what happens next.
A teaching evaporator with small-scale RO unit allows us to now teach via-demonstration tree-to-bottle workshops and seminars on an Ohio State campus, provide more complete tours for events like the upcoming Maple Madness event on Saturday, March 2nd (more on that in a second), and sets the table for a new Sustainability Theme GE course debuting in Spring of 2025 – Maple: A Sweet Taste of the Past, Present, & Future.
So yes, come visit us on Saturday, March 2nd at the OSU-Mansfield Maple Pavilion. We are excited to host folks for pancakes and syrup between 10 AM-1 PM, tours of the sugarbush and nearby vernal pool wetlands all day long until 5 PM, and good fellowship with one another for the Ohio Maple Madness Tour. Once you are on campus, just follow the signs!