Elderflower Champagne

It's that lovely time of year again, the elder trees are all suddenly going for it, blooming away. I am taking advantage of this. Off I went to collect the elderflowers in my new basket. The recipe says 25 heads of elderflower, which sounds like loads, but it only takes about 5 minutes to collect.

Recipe for 10 litres:

·       6.7 litres hot water

·       1.170kg sugar

·       Juice and zest of 7 lemons (I just peeled the rind off them, we'll see if it works)

·       3 tbsp white wine vinegar

·       25 heads of elderflower

1. Put the hot water and sugar into a large container (a spotlessly clean bucket is good) and stir until the sugar dissolves, then top up with cold water so you have 6 litres of liquid in total.

2. Add the lemon juice and zest, the vinegar and the flower heads and stir gently.

 

3. Cover with clean muslin and leave to ferment in a cool, airy place for a couple of days. Take a look at the brew at this point, and if it’s not becoming a little foamy and obviously beginning to ferment, add a pinch of yeast.

4. Leave the mixture to ferment, again covered with muslin, for a further four days. Strain the liquid through a sieve lined with muslin and decant into sterilised strong glass bottles with champagne stoppers (available from home-brewing suppliers) or Grolsch-style stoppers, or sterilized screw-top plastic bottles (a good deal of pressure can build up inside as the fermenting brew produces carbon dioxide, so strong bottles and seals are essential).

5. Seal and leave to ferment in the bottles for at least a week before serving, chilled. The champagne should keep in the bottles for several months. Store in a cool, dry place

Nettle and Dandelion Beer - Bottled

We bottled the nettle and dandelion beer!

We recycled old beer bottles and used a capping machine (sounds more sophisticated than it is, it's a bit like one of those big modern corkscrews with the two big arms).

 

Much to my amazement, it smelled very much like beer. We put a teaspoon of sugar in each bottle before filling and capping it, so that it will ferment a second time in the bottle, and get fizzy!

Nettle and Dandelion Beer

My brother is turning into a keen brewer, despite being too skint for much equipment, or indeed, ingredients. Therefore he was very excited to read about nettle and dandelion beer, something you can make from free and extremely abundant ingredients. Infuriatingly abundant for most gardeners.

The recipe says get a bin bag of nettles, a box of dandelion flowers (which is nice and easy as you don't have to dig up the roots and spend ages washing them), boil them for half an hour, strain off the liquor, add three and a bit kilos of sugar, cool it, add the yeast, done. Oh and some citric acid and yeast nutrient. Sounds easy as pie. So we picked a bag of nettles:

And a box of dandelions:

And then realised that we didn't have anything big enough to boil it all up in. People into brewing have big stainless steel pots and gas burner things to do it in, but we didn't so Pete spent all day boiling little batches in as many pots as we could find!

He does however have a big bucket to brew in, so eventually it all made its way in there and has now finished fermenting.

It didn't ferment for as long as we were expecting so the yeast might have died early. It might have gone horribly wrong! I'm not going to be the first one to taste it, that's for sure, it looks disgusting.

Its golden companion you can see there behind it is the mead! It's basically fermented honey solution. Isn't it beeyoitiful? It's been bubbling merrily for weeks now and shows no sign of settling down. I can't wait to taste that, but apparently I have to wait for a year, and then there's only that much of it! Honey is expensive.

Soon we shall bottle the nettle and dandelion beer....