The first time I tried to make spruce gum, I thought I had done something wrong.

I processed the spruce resin, put it in my mouth and started chewing.

And then it basically disintegrated.

Like sand..

I looked at Ron and said something along the lines of:

At the time, I thought good chewing gum should simply go into your mouth and immediately behave like gum.

I know better now.

That first batch wasn't just the beginning of us experimenting with texture and elasticity. It was the beginning of me learning something spruce-gum chewers have probably known for generations:

There is an art to the chew.

Some spruce gum starts relatively cooperative. Some batches are hard. Some are brittle. Some can crumble into several pieces when you first begin working them. And some of the hardest gum we've ever made has still turned into a fantastic chew once it was warmed and worked properly.

If you've bought Alberta Wildcraft gum over the years, there's a decent chance you already know exactly what I'm talking about.

First: Brittle or Crumbly Does Not Automatically Mean Bad Gum

I want to make this very clear because many of our past batches have been harder and more brittle than some of the gum we're producing now. 

They were chewing real spruce resin — and in some batches, learning how to work that resin was genuinely part of the experience.

We've had gum that needed patience.

You warmed it. You worked it slowly. If it broke apart, you gathered the little pieces back together with your tongue. You kept working them. Then, almost like a switch had been flipped, those hard fragments began joining together and turned into a solid chew.

Some of our customers learned that technique right alongside us.

Other batches have been much easier from the beginning.

That's natural resin.

So Why Can Spruce Gum Shatter?

Spruce gum is made from natural tree resin rather than a standardized commercial gum base.

Conifer oleoresin is chemically complex. Scientific literature describes it as a mixture of terpenoid compounds, including volatile components and less-volatile diterpene resin acids. As volatile components are lost over time, the material can become harder. Research on spruce resin has also shown that differences in chemical composition can affect physical properties such as viscosity.

In the forest, I've seen the practical version of that science over and over again.

Some spruce resin is soft enough to press with a finger. Some is deep red and hard enough to snap. Some is crumbly. Some is incredibly sticky. Some looks nearly identical to another piece and behaves completely differently once you start working with it.

Cold Spruce Gum Can Be Extremely Hard

If you've ever handled resin outside in an Alberta winter, this part isn't exactly shocking.

Temperature can dramatically change how resin feels.

A piece that is hard and brittle when cold can soften substantially as it warms. That matters when you're trying to chew it.

One of the biggest mistakes a new spruce-gum chewer can make is taking a hard piece and immediately trying to crush it between the back teeth like a piece of commercial gum.

That's often when the shattering starts.

Instead, give it time.

Let your mouth warm it. Use your tongue. Work it gently.. If it breaks into smaller pieces, keep those pieces together rather than immediately deciding the gum has failed.

Our full How to Chew Spruce Gum beginner's guide goes deeper into the technique.

The Art of the Chew Is Real

This is one of those things that's difficult to explain until you've actually experienced it.

Commercial gum trains us to expect instant gum.

Open wrapper. Put it in your mouth. Three chews later, done.

Traditional resin gum can ask a little more from you.

Some pieces almost need to be persuaded into becoming gum.

I've had pieces start hard enough that you'd swear they weren't going anywhere. Then they warm, the fragments begin sticking to one another, the mass becomes more flexible and suddenly you're chewing something completely different from what went into your mouth.

That learning curve is why someone new to spruce gum can have a very different first experience from somebody who's been chewing it for months.

The experienced chewer knows not to panic when a hard piece cracks.

They know what comes next.

But Sometimes It Really Is the Resin

Now for the other side of this.

Not every piece of resin is destined to become great chewing gum.

There is a difference between hard or crumbly gum that needs to be worked and resin that simply never develops into the chew we're looking for.

I've encountered both.

I've harvested resin that looked beautiful and behaved terribly. I've worked pieces that never really came together properly no matter how much patience I gave them.

That is why experience matters.

We don't simply scrape whatever resin we find off a tree, put it in a tin and call it chewing gum.

Selection matters. Processing matters. Testing the chew matters.

And because Ron and I harvest the resin ourselves, we're handling the material from the forest onward.

Why We Started Adding a Little Pine Resin

That first crumbly spruce batch also sent Ron and me down a rabbit hole.

I wanted to understand how to make the finished gum more elastic and more consistent without turning it into conventional gum.

So we experimented.

We worked with spruce and pine. We tried beeswax. We changed ratios. We chewed batches. Then we changed things again.

Pine resin helped give the gum elasticity.

At one point we used beeswax too. It helped in some ways, but it could create another problem: sticky gum.

So we kept going.

Eventually we removed the beeswax, increased the spruce and balanced it with a smaller amount of pine resin.

That's why Alberta Wildcraft spruce gum today is made primarily from spruce resin with a small amount of pine resin for elasticity.

The pine isn't there because we couldn't find enough spruce.

It's there because years of making and chewing this stuff taught us something about texture.

Our Gum Has Changed Over the Years

This is another part of the story I don't want to erase.

If you've been buying from us for a long time, the gum you've received hasn't necessarily behaved exactly like every batch we make today.

We've learned.

We've changed ratios. We've removed beeswax. We've gotten better at selecting resin. We've handled more resin, made more batches and chewed more of our own mistakes.

Some earlier batches were extremely hard.

Some were more brittle.

Some required much more of that old-school warm-it, gather-it, work-it technique.

And people still chewed them.

In fact, some customers became incredibly good at working those harder pieces.

That's part of Alberta Wildcraft's history, not something I want to rewrite now that we've learned more.

Why Doesn't Every Piece Feel Exactly the Same?

Because trees aren't factories.

Commercial gum manufacturers can formulate a standardized base and tightly control the ingredients going into it.

We can sort resin, select it, combine materials intentionally and control our process — but our starting material was still produced by living trees outdoors.

Scientific work on conifer resin supports what we've seen firsthand: resin is chemically diverse, and differences in its components can affect physical properties.

So two pieces don't have to behave identically to both become good chewing gum.

That's an important distinction.

Variation is not failure.

Hard Resin Isn't Bad Resin

We've harvested beautiful deep-red spruce resin that is extremely hard at room temperature.

A hard resin may simply need warmth and technique before you can judge the chew it will become.

Likewise, very soft resin isn't automatically better.

Something can begin wonderfully soft and then become far too sticky.

That's why appearance or initial hardness alone doesn't tell me whether a piece belongs in chewing gum.

I want to know what happens after it's worked.

What Should You Do If Your Spruce Gum Crumbles?

Don't immediately throw it away.

If it's a hard or brittle piece, give it warmth and time first.

Keep the fragments together. Work them gently. Let your saliva and mouth temperature do some of the work before deciding what you've got.

If those pieces gradually begin joining together, keep going.

That's the art of the chew.

If you've patiently warmed and worked it and the resin simply never develops into a usable chew, then yes — you may have found one of those pieces that just isn't going to cooperate.

But crumbling at the beginning is not, by itself, proof that the gum is bad.

We cover other beginner issues in Common Mistakes and Questions When Chewing Spruce Gum.

The Very First Crumbly Batch Wasn't Really a Failure

I definitely thought it was at the time.

I had a mouthful of sandy spruce resin and absolutely no intention of selling people something I couldn't figure out how to chew.

But that batch forced me to learn the material.

It taught me the art of the chew.

It led us to experiment with pine.

It led us to beeswax.

It led us away from beeswax.

It taught me the difference between resin that needs patience and resin that simply isn't a great chewing piece.

And eventually it helped lead to the gum we make now. and that came from many years of experience. And we test every single batch that leaves our house. In fact, I do a random control test throughout the entire batch process, I usually end up with about 8 or 10 pieces, randomly selected to make sure the entire batch turns into a good chew.

You don't learn that from looking at a tree.

You learn it by chewing the hard batches too.