We started making some elderflower champagne 2 weeks ago, and due to our busy-busy schedules, have ended up leaving it to stew in the bucket for (so far) 3 days longer than it should have. If Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall were dead, he’d be spinning in his grave, as we appear to be “butchering” his recipe. Having said that, the comments show that we aren’t the first people to take liberties with his (lets face it, pretty clear) instructions.<\/p>\n
I brought the recipe home (from printing it at work, so we didn’t have to cook with an open laptop in the way) annotated with stuff from the comments questioning the quantities. Steve had another look and said “yeah, that’s just because there are stupid people. The recipe says it makes 24 bottles, but doesn’t say what size bottles. It makes 6 litres, so if you’re using 2 litre bottles (as we will be (heaven help us – the house will collapse when they explode)) it only makes 3 bottles.”<\/p>\n
The bottling would have occurred by now, only Steve implied that my plan of sterilising with boiling water probably wasn’t good enough, so I’ve stepped back to allow the beer-making expert to step in.<\/p>\n
And he’s crazy-busy with work.<\/p>\n
So, on Saturday,\u00a0 I went ahead and bottled. I used the boiling-water sterilising technique which, it turns out, partially melts bottles originally intended to hold Tesco smart-price fizzy water (from Mum’s collection). So we have nearly 5 almost-2-litre bottles of syrupy fizz, which hopefully we’ll get to drink before they explode all over the coal-shed. The straining and bottling went well, although some at the end had to be double-strained as I dropped the sieve into the bowl of strained juice. Joel liked the taste, Lily didn’t – really no surprise there, as Joel is a big fan of elderberry cordial (overberry cordian) and Lily doesn’t like new stuff.<\/p>\n
It should be ready to drink when we get back from Glasto. Let’s hope we make it that far!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We started making some elderflower champagne 2 weeks ago, and due to our busy-busy schedules, have ended up leaving it to stew in the bucket for (so far) 3 days longer than it should have. If Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall were dead, … Continue reading