Steam envelops Roger Jackson inside his sugarhouse on Hebron Road in Oxford on a recent winter afternoon as a steady stream of relatives, neighbors and “competitors” stop to check on his operation, gossip and poke fun at each other.

With the sweet aroma in the air and the warmth of the boiler turning the sap into syrup, it’s the place to be on this cold afternoon.

Roger relishes the long days and hard work required to produce the amber colored maple syrup, or “liquid gold,” even though he vowed never to do the chores again when he left home for the military. 

“When I was a kid growing up I would have to work the fields harvesting crops and lugging jugs of sap from the mountaintops. I swore I’d never do it again,” he said. “But when my granddaughter asked me to show her how it was done for a project at school, something happened. I guess it was the sugar in my blood coming back. So what do I do now? Pick beans and cukes in the summer and make syrup in the spring. I guess it has something to do with it being a choice, not a chore, and I just love it.”

A wry smile creases his rosy cheeks. “My granddaughter saw how much work went into it and that was it for her. But I kept going.”

The process has changed a great deal since Roger was young. Instead of boiling big pots of sap over an open fire, his stainless steel evaporator, flue and finishing pans are fired using an oil furnace. Instead of lugging jugs of sap from the mountaintop, plastic tubing carries it from the trees.

“Every morning I fill the motor on the vacuum pump with five gallons of gas and it runs all day until it goes dry,” Roger said.

The sap is pulled through the tubes into a tank that is then pumped into a giant stainless steel holding tank suspended high above the boiler. Gravity and modern technology keep the flow regulated and gauges measuring everything from heat to the sugar content in the ever-thickening mixture makes the process more precise.

“When I was young, the way we determined when it was ready to pour was to dip a spoon into the pot and watch how slow it dripped off. Now we have a hydrometer to measure the exact water-sugar content,” Jackson said.

It is then a matter of running it through a filter and reheating it to an exact temperature so that bacteria is kept in check.

The daily process starts when the sun comes up and often is not finished until well after midnight.

It’s Roger’s goal to produce 250 gallons of maple syrup and break even this year. With the amount of work involved and the high cost of oil, it is not a money-making endeavor but a labor of love that produces the sweet treat.