HERMS system for maple syrup boiling?

[dlwhitlinger]

I built a 30 gallon HERMS system following a lot of the instructions from the Electric Brewery website - great resource. My brew kettle has two 5500W elements on a PID and I can also select to either use one or both depending on whether I want to ramp up the heat quickly to get to a boil or just maintain the boil.

My boys are interested in doing maple syrup this year and it looks like we have 20 sugar maples that we can tap into. I have two 45 gallon stainless fermenters that I put into a standup refrigerators. I was thinking that I we would load up the fermenters with raw sap and keep it refrigerated and then boil it down in the brewery boil kettle....we'd periodically add another gallon to the boil kettle as more water boils off until all 90 gallons have been added and then continue to boil it down until we get to 5-6 gallons of sap/syrup and then filter it before the final boil. We would finish it off in a smaller stove top stainless brewery kettle so we could get the temp accurate for the finish.

Has anyone done maple syrup from sap before? Has anyone used electric heating elements like this on sap? Any thoughts? Concerns? Suggestions?

Dave