[John F]

Do your mixing in the bottles themselves.

Weigh a full container. Take it's weight times .66. This is how much sugar you want to put into the container. Actually assume the container weight isn't negligable and round it down a bit.

Get a tea kettle and boil water. Fill the container so it is full, then stir or shake.

If you have more than a tea kettles worth then get two until you have enough that a hose at the hot water heater makes sense.

At least the sticky mess will be contained to your work area.

 

[John F]

Turkey fryer.

That's a great idea too! A turkey fryer, a big ladle (so you can carry one containers worth of water), and your containers already loaded with sugar. Should be able to make 12-15 gallons at one time this way.

I added the ladle because I figure the you won't want to try and move the huge kettle of hot water or the hot containers.

 

[John F]

Ok, I had a chance to try the method I suggested.

I use quart jars, so this was done at the quart jar scale. I had a couple of jars that put together would make one quart and a few empties. Here's what I did.

First I put a quart jar on my electronic scale and tared it. Next, I poured the left overs into the jar on the scale until I had the jar filled just below the top. Weight of syrup - 42 oz.

2:1 by weight means 28oz sugar to 14oz water.

Again with a tared empty jar on the scale. Poured dry sugar into the jar until 28oz. Pour boiling water from tea kettle untils full. It worked great.

Some observations:

The amount of sugar will fill the jar to just below the neck - top of the shoulder. Pretty full. Pour the hot water slowly and stir with the handle of a wooden spoon. (Ok, use whatever you want, but I fully encourage the use of wooden spoons.

) Once all of the sugar is wetted, fill the jar to the top, put on a lid, and shake it.

To test I made 3 quarts with this method (using the volume measure for the sugar as described above) and it worked great. No sugar syrup mess in the kitchen. Small dry sugar mess because a pixie flew through and caused me to loose my grip on the sugar bag. Really, it wasn't my fault.

Next time I will try it with hot tap water. I suspect success may be related to how hot we keep our hot water heaters.