Vacuum Filter / Steam Bottler - Hobby/DIY
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 bottl...