It has been two weeks since I bottled the elderflower champagne.  When it went in to the bottles there was absolutely no sign of any action at all with regards to fermentation.  But a couple of days ago I was chatting with the guy at May and Brett’s and he said I should take a look and release pressure if needed.  I am glad I did – the pressure was so high that the bottles were not really bottle shaped and were bulging out.  you can sort of see in the photo that the bottle no longer has the defined ridge for the label – and this is AFTER easing off the pressure.

I estimate the alcohol content of this to be about 3% (I forgot to do a gravity reading beforehand, so that is based on calculation only).  It is definitely drinkable, though very elderflowery (surprise), two weeks after being started, but I think that next time I will ferment in the bucket for longer and maybe try some commercial champagne yeast to see if it makes a difference.

Elder on the far right[/caption]

I have not made elderflower champagne before, but a little bit of research suggested that it was pretty easy.  In the end I doubled up a recipe from the River Cottage forums, but all the ones I found looked pretty similar.  Here is the recipe I used metricised and doubled up:

9l hot water
1.62kg white sugar
7 heads of elderflowers
2 lemons, sliced thinly
30ml white wine vinegar

Dissolve sugar in water, and leave to get cold; add lemons, flowers and vinegar. Cover loosely with a tea towel and leave for 24 hours. Strain and bottle, try after a fortnight.

I saw absolutely no evidence of fermentation in the mixture AT ALL.  Maybe I put the elderflowers in when the water was too warm (28°C) but that seems a bit pessimistic since I found many examples of people saying that there never is any sign of fermentation.  This is natural yeast after all (I’d bought some champagne yeast before researching this).

24 hours after mixing it up I bottled it, and you can see the result below.  It looks the right colour and I am very interested to see what happens over then next two weeks.  At least I know that my PET bottles won’t explode.