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Showing posts from February, 2020

Vacuum Filter / Steam Bottler - Hobby/DIY

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Does anyone else find filtering to be one of the most frustrating (and slow) parts of sugaring? I do.  If you are a small/hobby producer and are using a set of cone filters like I have been, it's awful.  It's slow.  It wastes your precious syrup.  And the results can leave some niter which settles out later - not attractive in nice glass bottles. Filter presses (like the big producers use) work awesome but they aren't conducive to smaller scale hobbyists.  First, they are expensive.  Second, they require a fairly large minimum volume of syrup for processing (5 gallons might be my entire season!).  Third, fairly involved set up, tear down, and cleaning. So what is an alternative? A vacuum filter . You can achieve drastic improvement over cone filtering (time and quality) at a fraction of the cost of a filter press. This year I built a vacuum filtering unit that also has a steam pan to keep the filtered syrup at a constant temperature for bottling.  That prevents mo