Elderflower Champagne Recipe
Make a sweet and citrusy sparkling wine using elderflowers, lemon juice, and a few other ingredients. Yields approx. 4.5 liters (152 fl. oz) that is best served chilled on a lovely summer's day. The process of making elderflower champagne begins with picking fresh elderflowers, infusing them in sugar, and then using the sugar to make a sweet liquid that you ferment using sparkling wine or champagne yeast. The black tea in the recipe gives the sparkling wine body and structure and the tea itself cannot be tasted in the final recipe.
Servings 6 Bottles
Calories 120kcal
Cost $30
Equipment
- 1 carboy / demi-john please see my note at the bottom on size
- plastic soft-drink bottles Enough to store 152 fl. oz (4.5 liters)
- hydrometer optional
Ingredients
Fermenting
- 5 quarts water 4.7 liters
- 4.5 cups white sugar 900 g
- 1¼ cups black tea 285 ml
- 10-20 fresh elderflowers or 25 g dried elderflowers
- 4 unwaxed lemons zested and juiced
- 2 tsp yeast nutrient
- 1 sachet champagne yeast or sparkling wine yeast / 5 g
Instructions
Initial fermentation
- Make a large mug of strong black tea and leave it to steep while you're working on the next step. English Breakfast or another black tea of your choice is fine.
- Place the sugar in a large tub on your kitchen countertop. Next, heat the water to a boil, and then pour it over the sugar. Stir to dissolve the sugar. Strain the tea and pour the liquid into the tub, along with the yeast nutrient. Leave the mixture to cool to room temperature.
- While the mixture is cooling, prepare the elderflowers and lemons. Pluck the flowers from the stems using your fingers or a fork. Small pieces of green stems are fine, but avoid plucking too many of them as they can make the elderflower champagne bitter.
- Zest the lemons, then juice them and strain the juice to remove the seeds.
- When the sugary water mixture is cooled, pour in the lemon juice and stir. If you want to know exactly what percentage of alcohol your wine is at the end, take a reading with a hydrometer. This is optional but allows more precision in winemaking.
- Sprinkle in the wine yeast and stir.
- Next, add the elderflowers and lemon zest. Stir again, then cover the tub with a clean cloth or tea towel. Leave it to sit undisturbed at room temperature for five days. By this point, it will be bubbling as the yeast begins vigorously fermenting. It can take two or three days for you to see any sign of yeast working, though.
Straining the liquid
- At the end of the five days, strain the liquid through a clean muslin or cheesecloth and into a second tub. Don't stir the wine beforehand since you don't want to disturb the sediment at the bottom. To do this step, it's helpful to line a large sieve with the cloth and set this over the second tub. Pour the liquid through so that the elderflowers and zest are caught in the muslin. Avoid pouring the bottom sediment into the new tub.
- Using a funnel, pour the liquid into the carboy/demi-john. It should come up to about the shoulder of the demi-john or at least two inches of head space above the liquid and the top of the vessel.
Second fermentation
- Next, fit a fermenting airlock on the carboy/demi-john. It allows gas to escape but keeps air and potential contaminants from getting inside.
- Leave the elderflower champagne to ferment in a dim place that's at least room temperature, if not a little warmer. Within about a day, you will begin to hear the blip, blip, blip of fermentation resuming and gases escaping.
- Proceed to the next step when the bubbling in the airlock has nearly come to a standstill - this should take about five to seven days. In the end, you should still see the occasional bubble come up through the airlock. This shows that the yeast is still active but not as vigorous as before.
- If you're using a hydrometer, take a reading now - ideally, you should have 1010 as a reading. Having both the first measurement and the one from this point will tell you how much alcohol is in the homemade elderflower champagne.
Bottling Elderflower Champagne
- Rack the champagne into clean plastic soft drink bottles. The easiest way is to set the carboy/demi-john on the kitchen counter and have the bottles ready on the floor. Place one end of the siphoning tube in the carboy/demi-john, about halfway deep, then suck on the other end until the liquid begins coming through. Hold the end of the tube over the bottles and fill them so that they have about an inch of head space. Move the tube down as needed, but avoid sucking up any of the sediment. Seal the bottles tightly with their screw-top lids.
- Leave the bottles in a dim but room-temperature place for another three to five days. Open a bottle every now and again to check that the yeasts are active and creating carbonation. When you're happy with the amount of fizz*, put the bottles in the refrigerator to chill and stop fermentation. Keep them there until you're ready to serve.
Notes
* Carboys and demi johns are basically the same thing - a glass or plastic container used for fermenting wine. Carboy is the US term, and demi john is the British term. However, due to differences in units, the sizes of these vessels vary by country. The demi john I use in the photos holds up to 4.5 liters (1.18 gallons) of liquid - six wine bottles worth. Most carboys that I'm seeing in the US are either one-gallon or five-gallon in size. If you'd like to use the one-gallon carboy to make this recipe, you'll likely have more liquid than you can fit inside, so there will be a bit of wastage. Alternatively, you can scale the recipe up 4x and fit it in a five-gallon vessel. The only ingredient that you probably won't need to scale up is the yeast, but read the yeast packet you use to see the maximum amount of wine it can make.
* It's possible that you can over-ferment elderflower champagne in the second fermentation, and in this case, there may be little or no fizz at the end. That's alright, though! Chill and serve as homemade elderflower wine.
Nutrition
Serving: 150ml | Calories: 120kcal | Carbohydrates: 5.5g | Protein: 0.1g