Elderberry Wine (Port) - Simple and delicious

well summer is nearly over autumn's just around the corner and elderberries are ripe today i want to share with you our recipe was handed down to us for making that wonderful country classic elderberry wine [Music] hello welcome to english country life welcome to the kitchen my name's hugh and today we're going to talk about elderberry wine now this recipe was actually part of me is elder report but it's not a treat poor it's not a fortified wine we're not going to add any spirits to it to bring up the alcohol if that's the kind of thing you want i'll put a link at the end of the video to our black report recipe and that's a proper fortified wine what we're making today is elderly wine but i understand why the person who wrote it called it elderly poor because it's really rich and luscious and sumptuous and it does taste like a nice rich pork but it's the strength of wine now a quick word on picking elderberries first things first be sure of your identification i made a video a short while ago for people to help them find elder flowers and i'll put a link to that at the end obviously the berries are a development of those flowers they come in the same sort of structure so if you're not sure what you're looking for have a look at that video and then you can understand what you're looking for and you'll see what the berries look for but you know be careful be sure of your id the other thing is people want to forage for elder breeze is that allowed well yes generally there are certain restricted bylaws in certain places but taking england as a whole we have a sort of guiding principle of you can forage for what is called the four f's which is fruit flowers fungi and foliage so you're not allowed to uproot things and things like that but the things that grow naturally on wild things like trees you can generally take some now i would always cancel when you're picking something like elderberries leave some for other people and leave plenty for the birds but a few bunches of elder breeze from a large tree isn't going to cause any problems we're lucky we have a number of elder trees on our property so i don't even have to go out to forage let's take a look at picking the right amount of elderberries to make ourselves a demi-john full of wine [Music] this is one of my favorite elderberry trees if you look closely you can see that rather than having one thick stem it's actually got loads of thin stems it's almost a coppiced tree because we keep reducing it in height to keep the elbows within reach notice also that i'm using a bucket because elderberries do stain so i don't use my normal baskets this is a decent looking bunch of elder breeze but do note that there are a few on there that are sort of greenish in color and you want to avoid them and even the ones that are red you really want as many as possible of your elder bees to that lovely dark purple color but don't wait too long if you look at this bunch you can see the birds have had them and over on this side the few that are left will start to shrivel and go hard and they're no good for making wine either so selecting your bunches is key i accidentally picked this bunch with another one and this is not a bunch i would normally pick because there are far too many green berries in this bunch and you don't mind lifting out one or two l debris that aren't quite right but not too many so this is what we're going for here be a bit discriminatory as you can see the bunch on the left perfect for picking will leave the bunch on the right [Music] the way i was taught to get elderberries off the stalk and you do need to get them off the stalk because the stalk give a bitter earthy quality to the white is to comb them off with a fork and that works but this year i've noticed that they seem to be ripening sporadically so what i'm tending today is pick out any obviously green berries with finger and thumb then almost just rake the berries off with my fingers and anything that's not quite ripe seems to stick to the stem a little more and it's harder to pull off the stem so it seems almost this year a better way is just to get hands on with the bunch pulling the berries off individually and leaving anything on right behind on the stem [Music] well this recipe needs a kilo of ripe elderberries and that's what a kilo looks like it's kind of hard to know when you're picking them what kilo looks like i use a plastic bucket as you'll have seen in the earlier video i did that yesterday and i think about two-thirds three-quarters of a plastic bucket full of ripe elderbridge still on the stalk will give you around about a kilo once you've stripped them off the stalks now i have kept these overnight and i put a bit of cling film over the top of the bowl to prevent them because i put them in the fridge to keep them cool and i didn't want the fridge to dry out the berries but my general advice is do get on with making the wine this isn't something you can't pick the berries one week and make the wine two weeks later because the berries will just go off so yet you can pick one day make the next but keep them clean and in the fridge and preferably covered to stop them drying out but don't keep them for several days because they will start to go off so that's what we've done to gather our elder breeze what next well we've got four stages now to do four little different parts first part clean and disinfect our equipment second part we need to make a must which is the flavored infused water that we're going to make into wine third part is we need to create sugar syrup to mix with that must and that produces the food that the yeast will consume to create alcohol and the fourth part is we need to make a yeast starter culture and that gets the dried yeast really rocking and rolling and reactivated so when we introduce it into the must it gets going straight away and when we've done those four steps what we're going to do is combine all the parts and that is how we'll brew our wine let's get going [Music] this is a demijohn it holds the equivalent of six bottles of wine four and a half liters in volume and we need to make sure it's clean so we don't introduce any nasty bacteria into our wine how do i do it well i just put a little splash a plain unscented household bleach in there i'll then fill it with water and i will leave that for 10 minutes to completely sterilize i have to leave it quite a bit longer and then i will fully rinse it twice now some people will tell you you should buy expensive proprietary wine making sterilizers and if you want to they're fine i use this method because it's the method my dad used and my dad had a phd in chemistry and knew what he was talking about with science and he was convinced that a good bleaching agent well rinsed with tap water will be every bit as effective as using proprietary sterilizers so i trust my dad when it comes to matters of science and that's what i do so we'll leave that now and then we'll pour that away in a safe place and rinse it twice thoroughly i've poured my bleach away safely and by safety i mean not down the drain because we're on a septic tank and bleach is really bad for septic tanks so i haven't poured it away down the septic tank what i am going to do now is rinse my demijohn thoroughly inside and out twice because that bleach will kill off our yeast if there's traces of it remaining [Music] let's make a yeast starter culture it's not complicated what i've got here is half a glass at room temperature of orange juice and into that i'm going to put about a teaspoon of wine yeast a good general purpose wine yeast works absolutely fine for this recipe you don't need anything fancy if you do want to use something a little bit sort of more named then a good gv2 robust wine yeast is a good choice i'm going to use that purely because i bought a load for another recipe and i have some left over all we're going to do open up our sachet pour it into the orange juice and give that a good stir and we'll leave it in a nice warm place and what will happen is the yeast will rehydrate it will begin to ferment we'll see bubbles on the top and then when we introduce it into the wine must it will be really off to a flying start [Music] now we're going to make our sugar syrup what i'm doing is putting one and a quarter kilos of ordinary granulated sugar into a pan or a bowl and then on top of that i'm going to add about 650 milliliters of boiling water and you should be able to always dissolve twice the amount of sugar as there is water if you're careful and you stir for a bit so knowing that 650 milliliters is 650 grams of water that should be able to dissolve 1300 grams of sugar and we've only got 1250 grams of sugar in there it'll take a little while to dissolve and i'll keep stirring it but again having the sugar pre-dissolved when we add it to the wine must means we know it's not sitting in a gritty lump in the bottom of the demijohn so that's what i'm gonna do but we don't need to put it on the heat it's got hot water on it would just keep stirring and in the end it'll make a thick syrupy liquid [Music] our damage on is sterilized now sugar is dissolving and our yeast is rehydrating so it's time to make the wine master flavoured water to turn into wine it's very simple i've got on the stove three liters of water coming up to the boil in a big pan i'm going to rinse the elderberries and add them and i'm also going to add 500 grams of peeled chopped oranges they will add an extra depth of flavor and the acidity really helps that yeast work effectively in the wine must as well we'll simmer the whole lot for 10 minutes then we'll let it cool and once it's cool we'll combine all our bits and pieces and we'll start the fermentation these are sort of i don't know average sized oranges and i find you need about five of them to get hundred grams for the time you peel them they're about 100 grams each this is how my grandad peeled an orange i'm sure there are better ways or other ways but i kind of do things the way i was taught which is to cut across in them and then peel off each segment of skin works very well for me and at the end of it you get a nice clean orange with not too much path that's the sort of cleanness i like to end up with oranges i don't want too much of that so i think it's important to take the pith because that white path really does give a sort of bitterness to wine that you don't really want when making the mast i like to slice across these oranges and then they'll break up in the boiling water and release all that wonderful juice and goodness it doesn't have to be overly tiny and it doesn't have to be pretty because later on today we're going to strain all this fruit off it's important to wash off any bugs or nasties on your elderberries but you don't want to over do it because you can force out the juice when they're particularly ripe so a light rinse is all you need with the fruit prepared i've got three liters of boiling water and saucepan and as i rinse each batch of elderberries i'm adding them to the saucepan and then putting in the orange segments that i've sliced across to let all that lovely juice out when you put cold fruit in hot water it drops the temperature of the water and you can't actually simmer until you get it back up to a boil so i've had the heat on for a while to get it back up to a full hundred centigrade now i can lower that heat keep it a gentle simmer for 10 minutes after 10 minutes we'll have this lovely rich dark purple liquid now we need to let that cool down now because if we introduce yeast into a boiling liquid we'll kill the yeast so take a couple of hours let it cool down to round about room temperature if you are in a hurry and you want to cool your must quickly the technique i would advise is put the pan into a sink put the plug in and run cold water until it's level with the liquid inside the pan let that cold water draw some heat out let it go down the plug hole and replace it about every 10 minutes or so and that will cool the mass much more quickly than waiting for the air to do it but either way works [Music] well i've used my handy dandy kitchen thermometer and i've checked the temperature of the mustard it's down to about 25 centigrade and that's fine next step then is to strain off all of the fruit from the liquid and i'm going to do it in two steps i'm going to do a core straining while we strain off the big lumps of fruit just by running it through a fine sieve and straining out the big pieces of fruit and then as i put it into the demijohn i'm going to run it through a couple of layers of muslin cloth as well to get out any really tiny fine material that's still in that must let's do that now my first stage of straining is just to pass the whole lot through a fine sieve as i said and that will get out the big lumps of orange and the elder breeze but it won't remove any little fine particles that are in the liquid so let's fine filter the mast i've put a nice big funnel into the demijohn and on top of that i'm going to set a sieve and i'm going to put a couple of layers of muslin into the sieve and that'll give a really fine finish to our must this stage may seem like a bit of a faff but honestly it's worth it it makes finally clearing the wine at the end so much easier and another tip if you're going to do a lot of this brewing and home preserving is get a really good big ladle now that i've filtered the wine must i'm going to add the sugar syrup and you can probably tell that it's now quite a thick gloopy liquid all the sugar's dissolved what we're going to do is just run that through the funnel into the demijohn with those two elements combined here's our yeast starter culture look at that nice thick foamy head that's got on it i'm gonna pour it in now i'm just gonna give it a quick stir to make sure that it's well mixed up and we'll add that to our must and sugar syrup that is all our ingredients combined now i want you to notice there's still quite a gap at the top of our demi jump i'm doing that deliberately because the fermentation can get quite violent with algebra wine so what i want is some headspace for any sort of bubbles and foam that get created to sit rather than foaming out through the top of the demijohn after two or three days when that calms down to just a gentle steady bubbling i will top the damage on up so that it's full with clean water in the meantime i'm going to use a long skewer just to give it all a good stir fully combine our three sets of ingredients and we'll put it on a warm windowsill to do its job so just before we let that start to ferment i'm gonna fit an airlock i've talked about these in lots of other videos so i'm not going to spend too much time on it but suffice it to say it's a form of s bend with some water in the bottom of the bend and as gas is given off by the fermentation it will come up here push the water around the corner and then bubble up and out of the top but that water in the bottom prevents any vinegar flies from getting into the fermenting must and turning it to vinegar which we really really don't want after we've gone to all this effort so always try and fit an airlock if you can to your fermentation vessel well there we have it that's our traditional recipe for making a really good elderberry wine or elder report as the handwritten version that was passed to me had it if you've enjoyed today's video can you spare us five seconds give us a thumbs up down below i've had a lot of comments recently asking for more sort of home brewing videos and if that's the sort of thing that interests you please leave me a comment in this video and tell me what you'd like to see do you want to see country wines do you want to see mead would you like to see more of the sort of fortified wine recipes or flavored spirits let me know what interests you and i'll try and make the right kind of videos that you want if you want to see those videos and everything else we do on country life small holding self-sufficiency and you haven't subscribed to the channel already just tap on the subscribe button down there hit the bell next to it it's completely free and then you'll hear every time we upload a new video but for today thanks for watching come back and see us soon take [Music] you

Channel: English Country Life

Views: 26,503

Keywords: Good Life, Homestead, Elderflower, Elderberry, Wine, Country Wine, Hedgerow wine, Brewing, Fermentation, Elder Flower, Home Brew, Home Made Wine

Id: 0kH1oVGVv8g

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 02 2022