Hedging your bets (or betting your hedges)

When you have enough Elderflower Cordial (you can get to our favourite recipe here) you might like to think about Elderflower Champagne. By the way it is a good excuse to plant a few more Elder (Sambucus nigra) bushes - available at http://www.ashridgetrees.co.uk/Common-Elder-Sambucus-nigra as you will find you have friends calling round in June and July almost daily and for the oddest reasons…..

This is a recipe that has been in our family for at least four generations and it is known as Gonga’s Pop - after the great-grandmother of the present youngest generation. She used to make it to keep us quiet when we were kids - being mildly alcoholic (about the same as a light lager) it did that very nicely. It is also the best Elderflower Champagne recipe we know:

You will need (to make 10-12 litres):

• Dissolve the sugar in the boiling water then put in the large container and add cold water to make a total volume of between 7 and 8 litres.
• Mix in the elderflowers, the white wine vinegar, the lemon and lime juice and their zests and stir the brew.
• Cover the whole thing with the clean cloth (or use an airlock if you are a brewer) and put it in a cool place to ferment for two days. If, after a couple of days it has not started fermenting (easy to tell as there will be a foamy sort of scum on top) then add a pinch of dried yeast to get it going. Generally you will find that enough wild yeasts came in with the elderflowers for this not to be necessary.
• Keep the container covered/airlocked and let the champagne carry on fermenting for another 4-5 days.
• Using a winemakers sieve or the muslin you covered it with, strain the champagne into another container, let it settle for a couple of hours and siphon it into the sterilised bottles. Do make sure they can take a LOT of pressure - this is not known as Gonga’s Pop for nothing. Seal the bottles tightly. N.B. If you are using plastic drinks bottles keep an eye out for ones that start bulging - if they do, loosen the cap to let some carbon dioxide out and then tighten again.
• Leave it to ferment for at least another week after which it is delicious although it gets better with age. In nearly a hundred years the family has never found out how long it keeps - however much was made never lasted more than a year…

Enjoy ice cold

Elderflower Champagne Recipe by
Frances Bosdari is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

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http://blog.ashridgetrees.co.uk.