After last year’s let-down on the Elderflower champagne front, I nearly missed the Elderflower Flowering season *again* this year. I’d got into my head that setting it off was far more complicated than it is. Then I read the recipe again. It’s not very complicated.

I got lemons & sugar on my way home the Monday night before we left for Glasto, and brewed up. We had just enough flower heads left in the garden, although one or two were gone-er than I’d have liked. Turns out my Dad’s house 2 miles up the road is in a different climate as their neighbour’s Elderflower has _still_ got some white heads on it some 4 weeks later. But still, not bitter.

We left it to brew while we were away, and the week after, I took advantage of the teachers’ industrial action to process it into bottles. Lily helped.

Luckily we have a Big Beer Bucket for the fermenting and I’d gathered 2-litre coke/lemonade bottles for the bottling.

We squished the tops to allow for expansion…

and while they mature & expand (within 2 days they were ROCK HARD), here’s the blog equivalent of hold music – the ridiculous and frankly showing-off head of flowers on one of my rose bushes (my hand included for scale here):

And, a week or so ago, we cracked open the first bottle:

It’s rather tasty. It appears to be quite fall-y-over-juice-y. We have 4 precious bottles, and 2 are gone already, shared with selected company. I hope to make at least 2 batches next year…

And the title of this post? This afternoon somewhat out of the blue Joel was asking about the film “Cloudy, with a chance of meatballs” which was the film we saw for Lily’s birthday treat in 2009. No idea why he was asking about it today (“but Mummy, why was it a pasta twister?”) but when I was thinking of a title for this post, it popped into my head (because the champagne is quite cloudy). Plus we had meatballs on our teatime pizza today (yum!).

p.s. 2009’s efforts can be followed here and the results here