32footsteps

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Mil had an openly socialist mayor as late as 1960 I don't mean a few policies, I mean an actual Socialist Party member In the '50s in McCarthy's home state yet

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There’s a reason for that. Much of Milwaukee’s population only spoke German. The only newspapers that were printed in German were socialist newspapers. By the 60’s more and more of the German population spoke English. Hell, my grandparents born in 1907 and 1912 (not in Milwaukee elsewhere in the state) first started to learn English when they started school. The church I was baptized and confirmed in still had church services in German until the mid 70’s. There’s a church approximately 20 minutes away from where I live now that still holds a German service once a month.

The Milwaukee socialism thing was more about what language people understood and could read in specific newspapers. If the “centrist” papers of the day were printed in German it’s very likely that Milwaukee would not have had the run of socialist mayors it did.

Stopped around noon. We only got a foot where I live. My parents are a couple of hours north and they had around 30 inches of snow.

I’ll answer as many questions/comments as possible.

You can tap any maple. You can also tap box elders as they are a cousin of the maple.

Primarily people will tap sugar maples as they have the highest percentage of sugar in the sap. The lowest concentration are silver (soft) maples. The trade off is that silvers piss like crazy. More volume but less sugar percentage. I also tap Norways and Reds. Their sugar concentration is in between sugars and silvers.

If you exclusively use one type of maple the taste signatures of the finished syrup will be different. It’s all good and you’ll know it’s maple syrup but pure syrup from sugar maple trees will have different flavor notes than pure syrup from silvers. The pure stuff that you can buy in a store will almost exclusively come from sugar maples. I tap a mix of them all so it has a unique flavor a bit different than if I only tapped sugar maples.

The basic standard is that it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of finished syrup. At 2% sugar in the sap it’s roughly 43 gallons. You boil it to remove water and it makes “test” at 66.9% sugar. As it cooks down the sugars and minerals in the sap caramelize and that’s what gives it its flavor. I try to get mine a bit past 66.9% so that it is more shelf stable. Below that and it could start to mold even after it’s in a sealed jar.

I use a reverse osmosis system on my sap to eliminate water and bump that sugar content up. One pass through that system will reject half the water and double the sugar content. If my sap is 3% it’ll take it up to 6%.

I have roughly 100 taps and I’m using plastic bags to collect. I’ll drive around with two 55 gallon drums when I collect the sap. I could run tubing from tree to tree and then to one or two collection points but I’m not there yet. My wife’s cousin has around 4500 taps in trees all on vacuum tubing. He simply flips a switch and the sap flows right into his sugar house. My 85 year old father in law puts in around 300 taps all on bags and buckets.

Some days the trees run like crazy and on others they won’t. Ideal conditions are when it gets below freezing at night and into the upper 40’s to low 50’s during the day. Sun is good as it warms the trees up. Last Wednesday was a sap flood.

I have a bunch of 55 gallon barrels that I use for storage and two of them are set up on a rack. From those two barrels I’ll hook a hose up to a float box on my purpose built evaporator and that maintains a consistent level in my 20” by 48” stainless steel pan. Then it’s all temperature regulated. Hotter the fire the better. Sap becomes syrup when it’s 7 degrees above the boiling point of water. I have an electronic temp sensor that will open a valve to drain syrup out of the pan when it hits that temp. Then when the temp drops back down it automatically closes. Once it’s up and running it’s an entire day of feeding wood into a fire and drinking beer.

I don’t have any pics up on a photo hosting site otherwise I’d add them into this. It is a labor of love. A ton of physical labor and the equipment isn’t cheap. I might have close to 20k stuck into it but it’s a hobby so I can justify it. I don’t golf, I don’t ride snowmobiles or ATVs, etc. I give syrup away to friends, donate a bunch to our church for a pancake breakfast, and use it to barter for things.

Schlitz and Stroh’s are still around. I have both in my garage fridge. Grew up drinking stroh’s and it’s at all of my family gatherings.

Schlitz brought back their original recipe around 2007 or so. The “New” (old recipe) Schlitz is pretty good. The recipe that turned it awful thankfully is no longer used. There is a huge, huge difference between the two. Similar situation happened with Rhinelander. The classic recipe isn’t great but the one they changed to was multiple levels of terrible. The original was made again and it’s great compared to what they had before.

Last week I drank a bar out of Blatz. Granted, it was the local VFW so they have Blatz, Hamms, and Old Style on tap.

For as many signs as I still see hanging outside and inside of bars around here you’d swear Andeker was still around. Nope.

Ash Williams, the character portrayed by Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness, summed this situation up perfectly when he said:

“It’s a trick. Get an axe.”

I’ve heard of this thing before.

2007 Wisconsin Case involving sex with a dead deer

A friend of mine was the arresting officer in this case. The story he tells about it is wild. The legal gist was that the defense attorney argued that the deer ceased being an animal when it died and therefore it was simply a piece of meat therefore it was not a criminal case. The judge disagreed.

Prior to this, Mr. Hathaway was convicted of killing a horse with the intent to have sex with the horse corpse. He was sent to jail and when he was released he was on probation living in a halfway house. My buddy and the probation officer searched his room and found boxes upon boxes of horse and livestock magazines. The probation officer thought it was a bit odd but wasn’t going to make a fuss about it. My friend disagreed and explained that to Mr. Hathaway horse and livestock magazines were pornography and therefore it is contraband.

But yeah, the initial encounter with him after banging the dead deer was crazy. He was wearing sweatpants. When they did a search of him his entire midsection was covered in deer hair and deer blood.

When we moved my neighbor came over the next day apologizing for possibly keeping us awake in the middle of the night. He was shooting coyotes off of his back steps. I scolded him for not coming over then because I have a coyote recipe for them.

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TN is sundrop country

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Only if it’s in a returnable glass bottle. There’s a Sun Drop bottler near where I grew up in Wisconsin. Sun Drop in returnables is light years different and better than Sun Drop in cans or plastic. That town has a yearly Sun Drop festival and a Sun Drop museum. On Christmas Eve my nephew and I exchanged 17 cases of 16 ounce returnables. That shite is more addictive than crack.

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Send him to Somalia.

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The average IQ in Somalia is already pretty low. Why do you want it to get any worse?

Then Greenland would want a professional football team whose fans think they are relevant but haven’t and will never win shite.

Please start a new thread the day after you see a girlfriend or wife’s vagina for the first time and regale us with the stories that the snatch could tell.