Elderflower champagne #3: bottling up your home brew

It’s exactly one week since we harvested and brewed up the elderflowers from our garden, and the elderflower champagne has already reached the fermentation stage when we can bottle it up, all thanks to our tried and trusted recipe. OK, I did add a pinch of yeast on day two, just to give it a leg up.

Those were the easy parts. The hardest, messiest, most labour intensive bit in making your own elderflower champagne is bottling up, which I did last night.

Elderflower champagne: the "Before" picture. Here's some of the flower heads we picked last Saturday.

What kind of bottles to use

You’ll need strong bottles – ones that can withstand the pressure of the huge amount of carbon dioxide produced.

You could try two-litre plastic drinks bottles (ones that held carbonated drinks, like tonic water etc).

But I prefer old Grolsch type glass bottles or – let’s keep this a bit French – Lorina pink lemonade bottles (check out the company’s slightly offbeat website, where you can “retrouver le goût de votre enfance”).

Elderflower champagne: the "After" picture - just one week later!

If you do use plastic bottles you will be able to detect the stretching and rounding if the pressure becomes too great and you can release the gas.

(Handy tip: stick some photos of politicians or pop stars that you hate onto the bottle. Then if it does blow up, at least you have the satisfaction…)

Sterilise the bottles using Campden tablets or boiling water.

If you are using chemical tablets (or the baby’s “Milton” sterilising stuff), don’t forget to rinse the bottles afterwards in boiling water.

Otherwise  the chemicals might kill the remaining yeast in the champagne mixture. And Milton tastes foul. Believe me.

Siphoning it off

You could use some muslin or a rough sieve to separate the gunge from the liquid.

But from past experience I no longer bother with all that carry on.

Instead, I do it in two quick stages.

• Step one: use a clean, sterilised plastic tube to siphon the liquid into a couple of large bowls or demi-johns (sterilised of course), and by the time it gets to the bottom of your stuff the air starts getting into the tube anyway, and the siphoning stops – avoiding any yeasty sediment and 99.999% of the vegetation stuff.
• Step two:  get a (sterilised) jug and decant this liquid from the bowl/demi-john into sterilised glass bottles, leaving a small gap at the top. The recommended gap is supposed to be about 50mm or two inches. Just make sure you leave a reasonable gap to allow the gases to expand.

Put the caps on tight and lay the bottles on their sides somewhere where the temperature will stay reasonably constant – around 21C, not too warm or too cold. A shelf in a garage or garden shed would probably do.

You lay the bottles on their side to minimise damage from flying bottle tops if the brew explodes.

Leave them to ferment in the bottles for at least eight days. This will create a weak alcohol content but lots of carbon dioxide.

Next step: opening the bottles (I’ll get around to this in a week or two)