Elderflower champagne recipe

The elders are flowering, I’ve started foraging, and now is the perfect time to start making elderflower champagne. I’ve been making this for 2 years now and have perfected my technique, so thought I’d share it with you today. Although it does involve a fermentation process, the final drink is very light and bubbly, and not very alchoholy at all. I like to bring along a couple of chilled bottles at Christmas, and it goes beautifully with a strawberry in the glass – it’s a perfect summery, fizzy drink!

There are a couple of things to bear in mind when bottling elderflower champagne. If you google for recipes, you’ll discover hundreds of horror stories of bottles exploding. So don’t google it, just use your noggin. I use glass bottles, and have never had any bottles explode, although we have had a few incidents with corks exploding off the bottles! We store our bottled champagne in the laundry, which is coolish in temperature, and also means that if any corks do come unstuck, the resulting puddles are easy to clean up.

Without further ado, here’s the recipe and my method. NB – I usually just halve the recipe and work with 5 litres of liquid:

Equipment:

- A large bucket (that you never use for anything else)

- Wooden spoon

- Muslin cloth, or teatowel to cover bucket

- Funnel

- Muslin cloth to line funnel

- Ladle

- Packet of sterilising rinse

- Wine bottles (with indentation in bottom)

- Champagne corks

- Champagne wire cages

Ingredients:

– 10 litres of boiled water, cooled

- About 25-50 elderflower heads – stripped from their stalks, but not washed

- 2 lemons (juice and zest)

- 1 kg white sugar

- 4 tablespoons of white wine vinegar

Method:

I’m a stickler for cleanliness/hygiene, so make sure your bucket is super clean. I usually wash ours with boiling water, and I make sure I never use it for any other purpose. I adore Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall as much as the next forager, but the episode where he made elderflower champagne in black plastic rubbish bins made me cringe. And when he scraped the mould off the top of his mixture – well… (also, his recipe that the BBC posted online originally had an incorrect amount of sugar or something, which seemed to result in many of the “holy crap my bottles have exploded” stories).

Boil ten litres of water, then let it cool in your clean plastic bucket. To this cooled water, add the juice and rind of two lemons, 1 kg of white sugar and four tablespoons of white wine vinegar. It’s really important to let the boiled water cool, because the elderflowers contain a natural yeast that is going to trigger the fermentation process, and this yeast will simply die if you plunge it into boiling water.

Add your elderflowers to your water/sugar/white wine vinegar mixture, and push the flowers down until they’re submerged. Again – don’t wash the flowers beforehand because you don’t want to wash away the yeast. Just sift through them by hand to remove any obvious wildlife. (You don’t need to add any brewer’s yeast either – honestly, the natural yeast in the flowers works just fine.)

Give the mixture a good stir with the wooden spoon, cover with a piece of muslin/teatowel and stand in a warmish room for a couple of days. Stir the mixture every once in a while. I’ve found that our mixture needs to sit for about 5 days in total.

After about 5 days, you’ll notice that the mixture in the bucket fizzes when you stir it. When I say “fizzes”, I mean that it makes a fizzing noise, and you can see bubbles. The flowers have turned brown by this stage, but that doesn’t matter. As soon as your mixture is fizzing, this means you need to bottle it.

I mentioned the bottling process earlier – and how confusing it can be to figure out what sort of bottles to use. If plastic 1.5 litre bottles float your boat, then go ahead and use them. After a bit of trial and error though, I’ve found green glass wine bottles to be the best type of bottles to use – they have the indentation in the bottom, and champagne corks fit into them. After all, if I’m going to give someone a bottle of elderflower champagne – I want them to get the champagne cork popping effect! I bought my bottles (and re-use them year after year) from here, but I also save Lindauer bottles, which work perfectly too.

Before you pour the fizzing elderflower mixture into bottles, you need to make sure they are sterilised. It’s important to sterilise the corks as well. I used to wash all my bottles and pop them in the oven for 100 degrees for 15 minutes, but I’ve since discovered a MUCH easier method – I buy a sterile solution in packets from the local homebrew shop, and simply wash the bottles and corks in this. I was hesitant to use this mixture at first, as I thought it might affect the end product flavour – but it works perfectly and has no discernable impact on the taste.

Line up the sterile bottles and pop a clean funnel into the first. Overtop of this funnel, I lay a clean piece of muslin cloth (that has been washed & then ironed at a very high temperature). The muslin is important because it’s going to catch the flowers and any little critters from the mixture that you don’t want going into the bottles.

I then use a ladle to dip into the elderflower liquid, and carefully pour it into the funnel/muslin cloth and fill the bottle almost to the top – remembering to leave enough room for the cork to fit in. To be honest, I usually require the help of Skruff at this point, as he’s much better than me at wedging the corks into the bottles. We then tie the wire cages overtop the champagne corks, and repeat for the remaining mixture/bottles.

We do keep a careful eye on the bottles once they’ve been corked and caged, as the mixture continues to ferment inside the bottle, and the corks can be forced out – despite the wire cages. We’ve only had to do it once before, but you can release a bit of the gas from inside (if you do it carefully and slowly) and only if it looks like the corks are going to explode. Otherwise, you just need to leave the bottles for about 4 weeks or so (or less), before you can can open them and drink the beautiful elderflower champers!

Some other useful tips:

Try to pick the flowers on a sunny day as they will contain more yeast. If you pick the flowers from different trees you guarantee better fermentation as the amount of yeast differs from plant to plant.

Don’t know what an elderflower looks like? Here are some places where you can find elders growing in Wellington.

Discard any mixture that goes mouldy. This usually happens because bottles have not been sterilised properly.

I recommend opening bottles outside – we’ve seen the corks sail over two back gardens and numerous rooftops. You get an awesome popping effect!

I transport the bottles in the boot of the car because I’m a scaredy cat.

If you keep your bottles in the fridge, then it’ll reduce any possible explosions. Plus – the elderflower champagne is much nicer to drink when chilled.

If you have IBS, or other stomach problems, then don’t drink too much, as it will upset your stomach, in a similar-to-baked-beans kind of way…

Bottles of elderflower champagne make the ultimate handmade Christmas present, and most people adore the taste of fizzy elderflower. Enjoy!

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Tags: champagne, elder, elderflower, elderflower champagne, foraging, recipe