The Bloody Hand

Live and learn, eh?
Clearly it was going to be a good year for Elderberries after such a bumper crop of the flowers and I nearly missed it!  We'd been replacing our boiler and the house plumbing along with reconditioning the radiators and this took far longer than we thought it would. Ah well...
Anyway.... Elderberries!
Managed to pick enough for 4 gallons, which was nice :)  I did a little reading on Elderberries before I started and apparently they are as close to grapes for balance as you're going to get. I looked up a recipe that basically said get berries, mash them, add water and leave for a few days then strain off the juice adding yeast. Bugger that, thinks I, I'll add the water then get the mixture going the usual way. Which was fine, except when I came to use a syphon to transfer the mixture to demi-johns after initial fermentation. It did not go well, the seeds and unbroken berries kept blocking the syphon so there was only one thing for it. I had to get a muslen bag and try and get rid of as much solid matter as possible and I really had to get my hands dirty (They were stained red for a week!).

I finally got the mixture into demi-johns and they seem to be happy.
Recipe was, Elderberries, yeast, yeast nutrient, citric acid and 1.5kg of sugar per gallon.
The left most demi-john holds a slightly different wine which I threw together in a mad moment. It's a Blackberry, Elderberry and Rose petal wine. Who knows?

Meanwhile I also had some bottling of the Elderflower to do!  That nicely produced 12 bottles. We would have had more but we had a neighbour (he's a farmer whose farm we sort of live on) and his wife over for tea one night and 4 bottles disappeared for some reason. These things happen :)
No hangover in the morning either, thank God.














Well, it's definitely getting a bit cooler in the mornings and it's no fun going to work in the dark, yep, I'm going to need to start a spiced mead very soon.
W