Elderflower champagne

Tuesday night, I bottled the elderflower champagne. It was happily fizzing away to itself in the fermenter by then, and ripe for corking up.

It turned out to be a messy and sticky job that took the whole evening. I cleaned out the bottles and then set out the washing up basin, water jug, a mixing bowl and the muslin we’d bought for the gin but never used. You need to filter the champagne before you bottle it, so I used the water jug to scoop it out of the fermenter, and then pour it into the mixing bowl through the muslin. I poured it back into the empty jug from the bowl, and then put the empty bottle into the washing up basin and carefully poured in the champagne from the jug.

It was very difficult to keep it all contained within each respective receptacle and so by the time I was done, 15 bottles later, it was all over the counter, floor and me. I got out the bucket and mop and cleaned it up, but next morning, as I walked into the kitchen, my feet stuck to the floor. What a mess.

So another clean-up was called for, and I resolved that next time around a better solution would have to be found. I’ll also have to find a better way to secure the corks. I used a proper corking gun to get them in, but one of them keeps on popping out as the mixture is so volatile in the last bottle filled. It probably got more yeast than the rest of the batch, and yesterday, after the second time it had been corked, it still managed to spit it out, plus a quarter of the bottle’s contents, along the outhouse corridor.

Each bottle is 750ml (1.5 pints), so with 15 filled we have 11.25 litres (close to 24 pints), but I’m keen to make more while there are still plenty of flowers on the elder trees. It smells lovely – kind of like a light, feint hot cross bun.

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home+brewing, self+sufficiency, elderflower