Selfsufficientish.com

I started some elderflower champagne with dried elderflowers - it sat for a day as my recipe asked for and now has been bottled for a couple of days. It has only just occurred to me I probably will need to add some yeast to make it boozey and fizzy as I would assume that commercial dried elderflowers don't have the natural yeast . Do I need to be more patient on the fizz front or is it worth pulling it out of the bottles, adding yeast and letting it ferment for a couple of days before re-bottling it?

Cheers!

I would say leave it for another week, and then check if you have any gas build up. If you do, fine, just leave it. If you still don't, you may want to add a bit of yeast.

Now this has just made me think that I could put all the dried elderflowers I have to good use (instead of the usual tea to counter hayfever ), so be interested to hear how you got on and what kind of yeast you would add and how much - is baking yeast any good? I'm not going to be able to buy brewing supplies anywhere nearby.

cheers Clara

This is the recipe that I use for Elderflower Champagne:
6 Elderflower Heads
2 sliced lemons
8 pints of water
1.5lb sugar
2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar.

Put the Elderflower heads and Lemons in a primary vessel of your choice and pour on the water, leave for 24-36 hours and strain through a sterile cloth, then add sugar and vinegar.
Stir until sugar is completely dissolved and pour into screw top bottles(but leave the tops slightly loose for 10-14 days.
Leave to stand for 3 months before drinking and serve cool.
No added yeast required and can be very POTENT the longer you leave it.

I've used this one for many years and it has never let me down yet!!!!!

sheena wrote:This is the recipe that I use for Elderflower Champagne:

8 pints of water
1.5lb sugar
No added yeast required and can be very POTENT the longer you leave it.

If all that sugar gets turned into alcohol I make that about 7.3%. !!! If it doesn't you will have a yucky syrup.
And it looks like you are fermenting in the bottles - explosion risk or risk of sticky froth oozing out if u leave the tops loose.

To my mind here lies the problem of elderflower champagne... if you ferment out all the sugar the result aint sweet. If you partially ferment it, how do you stop it? You have to kill the yeast or use non-fermentable sugars. But then you'll get no fizz in the bottles. My dad ferments it out nearly all the way, then adds artificial sweetener before bottling it. Reliable, tasty and fizzy, but you can just taste that "edge" of artificial sweetener

Wonder if anyone has any ideas that would take that edge off the sweetener problem?

apart from trying different brands of sweetener - dunno.

I'm sure I read somewhere once about which sugars were fermentable and which were not... never made the connection with EC at the time... any biochemists on here?

I presume also that if these recipes do indeed work, (and I have seen many like this) it is because the wild yeasts only partially ferment the sugar - that is they are very inefficient alcohol converters. A little too random / hit and miss for me !

How many dried elderflowers would be the equivalent of 15 or 20 heads for example? I am drying some but by the time I come to use them they wont be atached to stems.

I tried to answer this last night, but the site was unavailable just at the important point

Anyway, I found an equivalent but I'm not sure how helpful it will be. 6 grams of dried is equal to a half-pint fresh. Now all you need to do is work out how many fresh flowerheads in a half-pint. All such measures are for LIGHTLY pressed stuff - ie just give it a gentle push down.

Mike

[quote="sheena"]This is the recipe that I use for Elderflower Champagne:
6 Elderflower Heads
2 sliced lemons
8 pints of water
1.5lb sugar
2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar.
Leave to stand for 3 months before drinking and serve cool.
No added yeast required and can be very POTENT the longer you leave it.


Now I am REALLY confused, my recipe has to be drunk within four weeks. Probably a very silly question but is the longer life because of the larger amount of sugar? I use 1lb in mine but other quantities are similar. A friend was making it for a wedding in August but we did not think it would keep that long?? I get a small amount of sediment in the bottle, and thought it went mouldy if kept more than four weeks.