Elderflower Champagne *UPDATE*

I've followed a recipe by Andy Hamilton that was featured on the Guardian website LINK HERE

I'm a big fan of Andy's work and everyone should get a copy of his book Booze for Free. I will be brewing an ale from this book later next week.

First things first - The Ingredients

Elderflowers, Sugar, Lemon and Yeast

I used Young's Dried Elderflowers for this as I had a packet that I bought on ebay for a couple of pounds. This is the first time I've used them so look forward to seeing the results.

Next up is the Yeast. I went for a champagne/sparkling wine yeast - Muntons GV10. Purchased from the Homebrew Supermarket in Runcorn for £1.10

The Method for this is fairly simple. As the recipe says, this is more of a Elderflower Wine which is then re-fermented to produce the fizz. I picked this recipe after reading horror stories about exploding bottles, hopefully nothing this extreme will happen to me.

First stage is to add the elderflowers and the rind of the lemon into a bowl and pour over 3.5 litres of water. I added an extra 500mil of water after the dried elderflowers seemed to soak up a lot of the liquid.

This solution needs to be left for 4 days so I'll pick up this post then

*UPDATE*

So it has been 4 days since I made up the elderflower solution. This has now been strained and added to a fermentation bin along with 1.3 kg of sugar (that seemed a lot when measure out) the lemon juice and the yeast. It's bubbling along nicely helped a lot by the nice weather we've had.

Now have to wait for the fermentation to stop at which point it'll be transferred to a demijohn.