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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Kitchen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.