We're in Business!

Last week I sent out an email to the entire company letting them know the syrup would soon be on sale, and immediately got a slew of emails back reserving quarts or pints of specific grades.  One person wanted to buy a gallon off of us.  Now I'm in the process of negotiating with people who got there too late; 2 pints for the price of a quart?  Medium amber instead of Dark?  Our demand has outstripped our supply. 

In other news; last week, after about a year of being the Network Administrator, I was promoted.  It's nice to be promoted to a job you're already doing, since there's not much that's going to change save your salary and your title.  The former Network Administrator has been re-assigned the title Network Technician, relegating him to the things he is good at and leaving me free to make the whole operation a lot more efficient.

To celebrate, we secured another bottle of 1995 Krug, wondering, in the back of our minds, what might happen to the precious bottle this time .

The sugaring, at this point, has almost come to an end.  Basically we're boiling down the pan until we run out of sap, and then we'll run the contents of the pan off into a large pot and finish it all off on the propane burner while we clean the pan, pop the taps, clean the barrels, and shut up the sugar house for another year.  

So last night we settled down by the fire, fed it lazily, didn't worry about getting a boil, and drank our champagne.  Normally we write down our impressions on a piece of paper and then stuff it into the bottle for safe keeping, but instead we wrote them down in charcoal on the wall of the sugar house; our plywood, rickety, cute little sugar house .

The sugaring this year went smoothly and easily and we've made more than we ever did.  We're feeling a little cramped in our quarters though, a little limited by our set up.  This may be the last year in our little sugar house with our little 2 by 4 pan and our ridiculous little stove.  Next year, we might expand.

And that will give us all sorts of new things to worry about.  Here's to the future.

tags: maple