This is a fun process!
Elderberry juice is obtained by boiling the berries, pressing all the juice out, and straining out the solids. We grow and harvest the elderberries from our farm in case you didn’t know…..
I begin by combining the elderberry, lemon juice, and gelatin and let it congeal while I bring the sugar and honey to soft crack stage (285 degrees), stirring all the while. Then the pectin and gelatin mixture is added to the honey/sugar and cooked all together for about 5 minutes. I add the salt, citric acid and lemon extract, take the pot off the heat, and let it cool down a little bit before adding it to the whole plant hemp extract oil. It takes lots of stirring to combine the CBD thoroughly into the elderberry mixture.
The next step is to pour the hot liquid into squeeze bottles and fill every hole in the molds. The molds are placed in the fridge to cool while I clean up and prepare for the next round.
One of the most tedious parts is taking them out of the mold…..680 gumdrops later. And I always make 2 batches at a time, so that’s 1360 gumdrops!
To get the nice chewy texture of a gumdrop I allow the drops to ‘cure’ for two weeks before I package them in the tins and the CBD elderberry gumdrops are ready for sale.
