How to make Elderflower champagne
Elder flowers
Wine is easy to make, and the recipe for elderflower wine, or champagne, is doubly-simple. Right now, at the height of summer, the hedgerows are heavy with the creamy white heads of the elder flower, ripe for picking and brewing.
There are countless variations on the recipe for elderflower wine, so we averaged several to formulate our own brew, which should hopefully bring the best of each to the bottle.
We had 15 three-quarter litre (750ml) bottles, so picked 20 heads of flowers and mixed them with 2.1kg of sugar, the squeezed juice and chipped skins of six lemons, six tablespoons of cheap white wine and 12 pints of water, of which the first two pints were hot and the remainder cold.
We put them all into the same fermenter we used to make the beer, mixed it up and snapped on the lid so it could ferment in peace.
The elderflower wine mixture in the fermenter
It didn’t go quite as quick as we’d expected. That was Saturday, yet by this morning - Monday - very little seemed to have happened. The liquid was still clear and it didn’t smell much different to the way it did when we put it in.
So we mixed up a tablespoon of bakers’ yeast with sugar and hot water and left it to prove, then mixed it in with the liquid and left it alone while we went off to work. By the time we got home tonight, things had taken a definite turn for the better. The liquid was cloudy, it all smelt a lot stronger, and there was a gently tink-tink-tink as gasses fizzed to the top.
We’ll leave it in there for another day before we set about bottling it, and then must leave it for at least a fortnight before we uncork the first one for drinking. If it’s a success, though, I can see us doing a second batch before the elder flowers have all disappeared from the trees. That way we should have enough to see us through the year.
Elder flowers on the tree. The head on the left is in full bloom. The one on the right has yet to open.
Technorati Tags:
self sufficiency, self+sufficiency, self-sufficiency, elderflower, elder flower, elderflower wine
RSS feed
On Saturday morning, we drove up to Stebbing for our lesson on chicken keeping, and to pick up the first three members of our little home flock: Margot, Gerry and Barbara.
As energy prices rocket, anything that simplifies cutting down on waste is a boon. Bye Bye Standby does just that, by putting control of every plug in your home in the palm of your hand.
The weather is doing a pretty good impression of winter right now, so I’m glad I was able to pick the first tomatoes this morning. The first tomatoes always feel a bit summery.
A good lettuce is so much more than just limp green leaves. This year’s specimens have been a particular success, which we’re putting down to the fact that they’ve been grown under glass, rather than out in the garden.
The cat is turning out to be a first-class mouser, which is having benefits we hadn’t initially considered. Could he be the ultimate self-sufficient accessory?
July 2nd, 2008 at 8:58 pm
[...] It turns out it’s actually quite easy. We cleaned out the fermenter that we’d used to brew our beer and dropped in 20 elder heads that we’d gathered from the alley down by the allotments. To this we added the squeezed juice and chipped skins of six lemons, 4.5lb of sugar (whatever that is in kilos), a tablespoon of yeast and 12 litres of water, most of which was cold, but some of which was hot. You can read about how we did it here. [...]
July 7th, 2008 at 11:32 am
[...] beer, we were inspired by River Cottage Spring, and last weekend thought we’d have a go at making fizzy stuff derived from the heads of flowers which, at this time of year, abundantly fill the [...]