So at the weekend we made elderflower champagne for no better reason than the fact that the hedgerows are absolutely dripping elder flowers at the moment.
Plus I’d always fancied it.
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.
They say the results taste about as close to a good bottle of sparkling white wine as you can ever hope to achieve at home (unless you live in the middle of a vineyard and have plenty of willing feet for grape pressing, of course), but the smell last night as I bottled the fizzy results was like a light, feint hot cross bun. Yummy.
We got 15 bottles-worth, plus all the sticky mess that caked itself to the kitchen floor, the drawer fronts, the worktops and my hands and arms. I mopped it all down before bed but even this morning it needed a second going over.
That could in part be to do with the fact that the last bottle to be filled, which must have got the lion’s share of the undistributed yeast and is cloudier than the rest, is proving to be highly volatile. It had blown its cork in the middle of the night and spurted out some of its contents.
I put in a fresh cork and thought nothing of it until I got back from work tonight to find it had done the very same thing, this time spitting a quarter of its contents along the outhouse corridor. Thankfully I’d had the foresight to put them out there rather than storing them beside the cat’s bowls where we’d brewed the beer.
So now I have an outhouse that smells of easter, too.
But at least the cat still smells of cat.
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They’re brilliant Nik! even if you never drink them, you can be happy knowing they look beautiful!
Hi Nik,
I wonder if you might be able to pass on some advice. I made a batch of Elderflower champagne two weeks ago and bottled it in plastic fizzy drinks bottles. Yesterday evening there was a huge explosion and both bottles had exploded all over the kitchen! The biggest shame is that the champagne smelt amazing but was splatted all over the ktichen floor! Any advice on what I can use to bottle the champange? Is glass any better than plastic or will it do the same?
Cheers!
I’m not entirely surprised that your champagne managed to rupture a plastic bottle. I have now had six corks come out of my glass bottles, so it’s certainly very strong. I may have to start securing them with caps and cuffs as well as corks.
I deliberately avoided plastic on this account, and bought 15 clear glass wine bottles from a local brewing store, plus 30 corks and a corking gun. The total cost was £25, but most of that was for the corker, which can of course be re-used whenever we make wine, so it’s more of an investment than an expense.
I’m now collecting empty wine bottles from friends and family for the next batch.
Nik, I have your blog on a Google reader feed. Do you know if I can get comments on RSS?
James, down in the footer is a link to a comments feed, http://www.nik.co.uk/comments/feed/
watch out when opening the bottles………last night i opened the “Grolsh” type bottle and the pressure was so great that it took the lid off and cut my forehead……after a mop up of blood, still drank the stuff….