Elderflower Champagne

I wasn’t intending to post makes such as this but we made elderflower champagne for our wedding last year to use as the toast drink, originally just to save money on Champagne or Cava, it ended up being one of my favourite parts to the day and a lot of our guests agreed! So this is for all our lovely friends & family who have asked for the recipe.

I had planned to serve it in beautiful glass bottles at the tables but due to how fizzy it ended up we served it in the 2ltr plastic bottles we made it in, with some luggage labels tied on with twine to decorate. It ended up being perfect and just added to the beautiful, homemade feel of our day.

We used this recipe, originally found on goodfood.co.uk (which I’m obsessed with), which had been taken from River Cottage Spring book, along with a great deal and help from my now mother-in-law.

Ingredients:

* 4 litres hot water

* 700g sugar

* Juice and zest of four lemons

* 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

* About 15 elderflower heads, in full bloom

* A pinch of dried yeast

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 so you have 6 litres of liquid in total.

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 strong glass bottles with champagne stoppers (available from home-brewing suppliers) or Grolsch-style stoppers, or sterilized screw-top plastic bottles (a good deal of pressure can build up inside as the fermenting brew produces carbon dioxide, so strong bottles and seals are essential)

Seal and leave to ferment in the bottles for at least a week before serving, chilled. The champagne should keep in the bottles for several months. Store in a cool, dry place.

Tips

When you pick the elderflower heads be really gentle and try to keep as much pollen on as possible as this helps the fermentation process.

We chose to use champagne yeast to make sure the process worked, it may be a little more expensive but was so worth it.

As we picked the elderflowers in early June but didn’t need the champagne until September we transferred the mixture into a demi-jon for a few weeks to help the process before transferring into our 2ltr plastic bottles.

We used plastic screw top bottles as heard quite a few stories of glass bottles exploding and didn’t want to be redecorating just before a wedding.

Luckily for us my mother-in-law enjoyed a few tasting sessions in the lead up to W-Day. She added a spoonful of sugar to each bottle a few weeks before the elderflower wine was to be served as it begins to get a bit dry after a couple of months. It ended up just perfect!

Elderflowers are coming into bloom NOW so have a go too!

Photograps by Beki Young Photography