Grow Your Own Magazine

There was a recipe in one of the weekend newspaper magazines.

32 (?) heads of elderflowers
some (?) sugar
water
etc

Hmm. I'll look it up when I get home and post it here later.

I'm definitely going to give it a try

Hello, I've got loads of elder and it's flowering so please do post the recipe. Elderflower Champaigne! I can feel the bubbles going straight to my head!

sadly it's booze-free, but maybe we can come up with some cocktails. Will put recipe on tonight

Here it is, shamelessly lifted from the Guardian Weekend magazine 10 June 2006. Article by Matthew Fort

Elderflower Champagne

Like what my Granny used to make. A truly miraculous drink: the delicate flowers contain enough yeast to produce their own natural spritz. The murky non-alcoholic fizz with its ineffable flavour of Muscat was one of the haunting memories of my childhood.

36 elderflower heads
1 lemon
680g caster sugar
2 tbsp white-wine vinegar
4.5 litres water

Make sure there are as few insects as possible on your elderflowers. Put them in a clean bucket, along with the juice of the lemon, its rind without any of the pith, sugar and vinegar. Add the cold water and leave for at least 24 hours. You may have to stir it from time to time to dissolve the sugar. Strain into sterilised bottles. Screw on the tops (or whatever you have to do with the tops – I have some old-fashioned lemonade bottles with those flip-over caps). Leave for two weeks. Check the fizziness from time to time and let off any excess build-up: you don’t want the precious bottles exploding like bombs.


So there you go. I'll be doing mine this weekend. I'll report progress here

Here is another similar recipe for Elderflower Champagne - this one lifted shamelessley from a book called Country Bazaar printed in 1976. It also has recipes for the following;
Rose Petal wine (have lots of these),Elder Flower wine, Dandelion wine (knew there was a reason for having them on my lawn ),Clover wine, Coltsfoot wine,Golden Rod wine (I have this as well), Lime Blossom wine, Barley wine, Blackberry wine, Cherry wine, Crab Apple wine, Cranberry wine, Hawthorn berry wine, Oak leaf wine, Bramble Tip wine, Carrot Whisky ( ), Celery wine, Damson Gin, Nettle Beer, Rose Hip Mead, Hock, Ginger Beer Plant - it it would appear to support Brewers statement that if you can grow it, you can drink it.

Anyway, back to the champagne
1 pint elderflowers
2 lemons
1 1/2 lbs sugar
2 tablespoons wine vinegar
1 gallon boiling water

Pour the boiling water onto the sugar and when cool, add all the other ingredients. Leave standing for 48 hours, then strain. Bottl eand cork in strong bottles using champagne wire fasteners.

__________________
Rat

British by birth
Scottish by the Grace of God

Blog updated Wednesday November 13th

Thanks fot the recipes guys. ( When I was a child I thought Guy - as in Guy Fox- was a title as in Sir or Lord so take it as a compliment) I'll be out with the secateurs tomorrow cutting elder flowers and getting the fizzy going. I usually just leave it to provide berries for the birds. I used to have a neighbour who made elderberry wine. Now if you had a recipe for that

Alice
Ask and you shall receive
Elderberry Wine as follows

1 gallon elderberries
12 lb loaf sugar
3 oz bruised whole ginger
2 gallons water
1 teaspoon yeast

Boil everything except the yeast, in all the water for half an hour and strain through muslin.Add the yeast then proceed as for normal wine.

__________________
Rat

British by birth
Scottish by the Grace of God

Blog updated Wednesday November 13th

Ginger beer plant - how does that work then? Ginger, sugar, water, lots of sterilised bottles from somewhere? I've seen kits you can get which just seem to be dried ginger and sugar - you have to add lemon and water and leave it to explode in the back bedroom

I found a bit of root ginger in the salad drawer that had sprouted so I potted it up and now it's about 6 inches tall. I found an article somewhere on the interweb that said to keep it growing though the summer, potting up as required, then harvest the root when the top dies back in the autumn. So that will give me another bit of root ginger to leave in the salad drawer to sprout... or make some ginger beer!

Thanks for that Rat. I knew you guys would come up with the goods. Ginger beer is out ! I had a go at making it years ago and it all exploded in the airing cupboard! I had to launder every sheet, blanket and pillow slip in the house. I don't think I've ever fully recovered from the trauma !

Did my elderfower champagne today. Of course, I left it too long from when I got the idea (thank-you Matthew Fort) so only got 17 heads of flowers - there were some more but too high to reach. The others are all well on their way to becoming berries.

Also discovered i didn't have any caster sugar (sigh) so had a search around and found some muscavado - well, it's all sugar isn't it? - she says hopefully.

So, there's a bucket in the corner of the kitchen with not-quite-half proportions and the wrong sugar. Now I just have to find some bottles. Why don't I ever think these things through properly?

Sounds like an interesting experiment to try a different sugar - brown sugars alter the flavour slightly and also the colour of the finished product, but not having made elderflower champers personally (though I'm going to give it a go this year, our elderflowers are nearly out now) I'm not sure what it's supposed to taste of! Let us know how it goes!

Add some strawberries to the basic champagne mix, its wonderful!!!!

Thanks for that Olde9856. I've added strawberries to the recipe but I don't think I'm going to get to make the champagne this year as I'm still trying to persuade my husband that we need the flowers more than the birds need the berries ! Oh well, there's next year. Maybe he'll be more hard hearted by then.

my recipes say that you brew it as a wine first, it will have perfume only. It would benefit from pea pods, apples or grapes to give the wine some body. Must have nutrient if flowers only. You then treat it like a beer and when brewed add a small amount of sugar to acheive the champers bubbles under wired down corks. If the sugar has brewed out and then you add a measured amount of sugar your bottles will not burst. It is a sort of science, but not a difficult one. See my brew what you grow thread

Well, I've tried it. I think I overdid it with the sugar. You can still taste the elderflower, but it's too sweet and there's a marked taste of muscavado. It's not very fizzy either, does that mean I need to add some more sugar, Brewer? I suppose it tasting so sweet means that not all the sugar's been used up? Maybe I should leave it longer?

It depends - did you use a recipe with yeast in it or without?

If you used a yeast, then you can leave it a bit longer and the yeast will use up more sugar in converting it to alcohol. If your recipe is the non-alcoholic version (no yeast) then you'll have to try diluting the mixture to the right sweetness, but this will also dilute the taste.

With the fizziness - if you used yeast the fizz will develop when you bottle it - the yeast will still be active and the CO2 builds up in the bottle, which is why it pops when you open it. If you didn't use a yeast, the fizz is produced by the vinegar reacting with other ingredients (can yuo tell I did A-Level Chemistry?!) so if it's not fizzy enough try adding more vinegar and lemon in the right proportions and bottle again as per the recipe.

Good luck! And don't worry if you can't rescue it, don't let one set-back put you off, try again with something else! It's definitely worth persevering.

oops, I've been a bit slack in replying to this. Sorry Birdie Wife, I've not been deliberately ignoring you!

I didn't use yeast, but have been drinking it anyway mixed with other fruit juices. It tastes a bit odd, but not unpleasant.

I shall continue to experiment, though, in fact, I do have a backlog of rhubarb in the freezer and need to make some room in there. I believe this rhubarb schnapps thing is a bit of a initiation thing on here so it would be rude not to wouldn't it...?