...and flow it has! Well, we have been up to our ears in birch sap. :-) I can honestly say that the last two weeks have been spent doing nothing but boiling, boiling and more boiling of the hundreds of litres of sweet sap we have collected thusfar. The process has definitely been labour intensive -- it took us three days of boiling to make our first quarter cup! Of course, that wasn't without a few bumps along the road. Our very first batch, which we boiled down on an electric pancake griddle, had to be tossed. We started boiling at 9 in the morning and by the time it was midnight it still hadn't boiled down enough to be considered anywhere close to syrup consistency. So after much deliberation, we went to bed and left it boiling! Needless to say, we woke up to a black tarry film scorched on the bottom of the pan and had to start all over again. Arrrrgh!! We took this opportunity to think about how we could improve upon our boiling process, ha ha. For our next attempt, we decided to boil down the sap on the woodstove instead of the griddle. This ended up working very well for us. On our stove we have the capacity to boil down 20 litres of sap in approximately 5-6hours to the stage where it is very close to syrup and ready to be finished in the double boiler. Once the syrup is tranferred to the double boiler, it takes another 2-3 hours to thicken into syrup. The reason this process takes so long is because birch syrup burns if it is heated above 92 degrees celsius. A person, therefore has to simmer the sap vs. vigorously boiling it down -- hence the time involved. The work was worth it, though. The finished product tastes AMAZING! It is sweet and fruity and nothing like maple syrup at all, instead having it's own very unique taste. We are so excited about the results we decided to showcase the syrup at the Prince George Farmer's Market this Saturday. Yesterday we submitted our product to the board for approval and we should find out today or tomorrow whether we can peddle our wares. We'll keep you posted!