This is one of the few do-it-yourself alcoholic drinks that is ready really quickly, most require fermenting and aging for months. But this sparkling elderflower drink gives a real bang for one’s bucks, literally sometimes as it’s liable to explode due to the continued fermentation in the bottle (which gives it the fizz).
Make sure you use young vigorous elderflowers, old scraggy ones taste a bit mangey. Get out there when it’s looking fresh in the late Spring or early Summer. Hedgerows usually yield their bounty in the Autumn, but this is one you can get in the bag early.
There are two schools of thought on the fermentation process, elderflowers come with their own natural yeast cultures so you don’t have to add yeast of your own. However, if you want to guarantee the ferment and want a decent alcohol content using some champagne yeast gives brilliant results. Obviously you’ll want it to be potent and you’re ready to dice with death so here is the recipe. You can play around with the amount of sugar if you want it a bit sweeter.
Equipment
You’ll need a decent size couple of fermenting buckets, some syphon tubing and bottles. I’d recommend inelegant but safe reused fizzy drink bottles as they can cope with some pressure and crucially just split rather than explode in a shower of glass fragments. If you must use bottles they have to be champagne ones that are designed to handle the pressure, be prepared for the cork to go stratospheric. Actually there is a trick to ensuring the don’t go pop of their own volition, read on…
Ingredients
Flower heads from 8 elderflower sprays (not too much stalk)
800g sugar
4 lemons, zest and juice
½ tsp yeast nutrient
5g Champagne yeast sachet
Method
Dissolve the sugar in one of the buckets with a couple of litres of hot water, when dissolved add the other 3 litres cold. Let it cool and then add the elderflowers, lemon, yeast and nutrient. Cover and leave to ferment, after 5 or 6 days strain it into the other bucket, leaving all the sediment and bits of flowers behind.
Cover the bucket and leave to settle for a couple of hours. Now you can bottle it and leave it for a week – the fermentation will continue at a slower pace in the bottle. If the plastic bottles look like they are swelling up you can just simply release a little gas by loosening the cap slightly and then tightening back up. Try doing that with a cork. You can also slow it down by refrigerating it, which funnily enough seems to invigorate it if it’s been opened and gone slightly flat.
Cover pic: Adobe Stock
