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Sorry if I sound stupid
I have made a batch of elderflower champagne, now I need to know how to bottle it, what kind of bottles should I use (screw top, grolsh type etc), do I fill bottles - when hot or cooled down (after sterilizing), do I need to leave a space at the top of the bottle, if so how much and finally do I need to keep releasing gas to stop the bottles exploding.
As you can gather I have never attempted homebrew before, any help appreciated

Elderflower Champagne
Makes 24 bottles

Ingredients

About 24-30 elderflower heads, in full bloom
2kg sugar
4 litres hot water
Juice and zest of four lemons
1-2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
A pinch of dried yeast (you may not need this)

Method

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 to 6 litres. Add the lemon juice and zest, the vinegar and the flower heads and stir gently. 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.
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 glass bottles. Seal and leave to ferment in the bottles for a further eight days before serving, chilled.

For other mouthwatering Elderflower recipes see our River Cottage Cookbook.

RiverCottage.net


Hope this helps.

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I wish i could make a yo-yo work.
http://www.guerrillagardening.org/

Can't help with your original question but one thing I learned from here (thanks Shirlthegirl) is, if you have a dishwasher, put the empty bottles on the open lid of the dishwasher and the demijohn above and fill them there. That way, any drips (or in my case, gushes) will be caught on the dishwasher lid.

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A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot! (Thomas Edward Brown)

Never fill hot glass bottles with cold filling (that is general advice). For the rest, if you have got really strong bottles, you should be OK, but my last batch of home-made ginger beer blew the tops off the bottles (they were the 'clip down' type) so caution, and limited storage time, are recommended.....

That's what i was worried about
Thanks for your help, I think I know what i'm doing now

I have always been led to understand that bottling when the gassy alchoholic drinks, bottles with a concave base should be used as these tend to be the bottles which hold fizzy drinks. Check out the chamagne bottles in your local shops , they are all concave based bottles.
Good luck and enjoy, hicc!!!

I was given a tip to put in plastic bottles. If the pressure builds too much you can see the bottles swelling so you know to release some of the pressure. And if the worst happens and it explodes - you don't have glass all over your cellar.

I'm doing my champagne today or tomorrow - any negative comments on plastic bottles before I try them?

Interesting, Think I might try plastic bottles then. Or could try both and see how I go

Last year we used 2l plastic drinks bottles and watched the pressure build up and up and up...when it was a bit too much, we gently let some off and resealed the bottles. We'll be doing the same this year, although I also have some glass bottles from Ikea that we might use for ones to give away as gifts...

If there isn't too much sugar used there shouldn't be too great a build up of pressure.
But for any pressureized drink use PET bottles (plastic fizzy drink and cider bottles) or glass beer bottles.
You can buy new glass beer bottles at wilkisons, just basic brown beer type that you put crown caps on.
I've only used the plastic ones though as due to OH's cider drinking there are always plenty spare. Teachers!
Good luck,
ps. i'm trying to make elderflower cider at the moment by adding homemade Elderflower cordial to the apple juice.

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Simon Of Kells

thanks for all the advice, I'm going to go with plastic bottles - Is it possible to sterilize the bottles without using chemicals or will they melt???
Also does anybody know if you can use a similar (chuck it all in one bucket) method to make a fruit sparkling alcoholic drink??

just a quick warning for you all RE: the bottles.

over on the river cottage forums quite a few people have been logging on to report mass explosions of their brews!

You must either use a plastic bottle and release presure regularly or champagne/fizzy wine bottles with wired on corks (ordniary glass bottles will not suffice- champagne bottles are made of much thicker glass to withstand the pressure) or use a grolsh bottle or similar style one like Hugh used, BUT NOT THE IKEA ONES!

the IKEA bottles are for display only and are way too thin to withstand the pressure and several people have had theirs blow up. Even when using the right kinds of bottles some people have had them explode!

the best thing to do is store them somewhere safe and sheltered so that if they do explode, it doesnt ruin your decorating and spread shards of glass all over the place- you really dont want to get caught in the cross fire, so be careful not to distrub the bottles too much and fizz them up during fermentation.

Another thing that has come up is what people are brewing in- Hugh using a black bin has been frowned upon by many brew shops because using non 'food grade' containers to brew in can contaminate the drink and even poisen you- particualrly funny coloured things like yellow tubs! You should really make sure that you are using a brewing bucket or some other contaienr specifically designed for holding food, that isnt going to poisen you!

alot of people seem to be having issues with hughs ratios of water and sugar, but on the forum lots of people have suggested ammendmants- the only thing i didnt realise is the speed with which you need to start brewing after you have picked the flowers themselves. Within half an hour the flowers start to go catty, so you really need to get bewing as soon as you have finished picking.
Hughs recipe cannot be stored for very long at all as the white wine vinegar can basically turn the brew into elderflower vinegar eventually

hope thats a help? only passing on what seems to have come about from lots of peoples disasters! I had a chat with a lady in a brew shop and she explained quite alot to me. She said river cottage has caused all sorts of caos and everyone has been buying up the grolsch style brewing bottles left right and center, but because of the lack of info in the show alot of people are making fatal mistakes- with explosions being common and people brewing in all sorts of unsuitable containers. Alot of people have required extra yeast (most people) and she said that baking yeast wont be strong enough, you really should use a brewing yeast for sparkling wines. I think the show could have gone into a teeny bit more detail of the complexities to prevent some of the problems everyone seems to be having with this recipe over anything else that appeared in the 4 shows!

I haven't seen Hugh's recipe, but from comments on here it sounds like a mixture of a normal elderflower WINE recipe, and the elderflower'champagne' recipes other folk use.
I've never attempted elderflower champagne, because I like the elderflower 'sherry' we made the first time we tried it (a bit like the 'pale cream sherry' so popular a few years back, but with the elderflower scent in it as well). Last year's failed to come up the same. This year's is looking promising....

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Flowers come in too many colours to see the world in black-and-white.

We drank our first bottle today! Sisters, mum and other family bits came for lunch and we cracked one open. 'Twas lovely! Everyone was dead impressed. Sat in the sunny garden and had the Elderflower Champagne, homemade bread, lots of dippy nice things, and had a lovely time.

Then my darling family spent the next three hours driving me slowly mad (how can they have broken a door frame; the brake on our Bugaboo; a front door lock, and my usual calm state of mind in a matter of hours?). They're lovely, but clearly the most cack-handed lot in White Peak.

Breathe...breathe...

Mine's been inflating plastic bottles !!!!

Looked amusing and there was loads of fizz when I released the pressure.

Moved them to the garage in a sturdy cardboard box in a bin liner as a precaution, but when I tasted it, it was still really syrupy (I'm a dry white kinda gal)

I've used the Ikea bottles....3 weeks and they've been fine in a dark cupboard. They do fizz up alot when you open it!!

I've had to add 1 lemons worth of juice to each bottle to reduce the sweetness and it's helped!!