"Ophelia" wrote in message ...
"Alan Gould" wrote in message
...
In article , Roy Bailey
writes
Help! We have picked a large bucketful of elderflowers to make our
favourite
wine, but we can neither find the recipe book nor remember the exact
recipe
(because we didn't make any last year.)

We normally use one which involves the flowers, sugar, white wine
concentrate,
citric acid, yeast nutrient and yeast.

Does anyone have any good recipes, please?
Every year Joan makes Elderflower Champagne, which is the fizzy summer
drink with just a tiny amount of alcohol in it, very popular with
kiddies. It uses no yeast, just elderflower heads, lemons and sugar.

I used to make this for the children when they were young too but I lost the
recipe. I would like to make it now for my grandson. Please would Joan
share the recipe... oh and the druid one might be nice to have too? )

The one our family has always used is:

2 heads of elderflowers, juice and thinly-pared rind of 1 lemon, 24
oz sugar, 2 tablespoons vinegar, 1 gallon of water. Leave well covered
for 24 hours, then strain into pop bottles. Leave for up to a
fortnight to build up fizz and clear.

We call it "Elderflower lemonade"; but note that it's quite strongly
alcoholic: a pound and a half of sugar in a gallon could in theory
give seven-and-a-half percent alcohol. Which is as strong as that
lethal cheap cider in blue bottles.

Reducing the sugar to 4 oz will make it essentially non-alcoholic; but
then it gets rather chancy: you need to drink it in, say, a week, in
case it goes off because it didn't have enough alcohol in it to act as
a preservative. I find this works about half the time; you add
artificial sweeteners dissolved in hot water at the start to make up
for the lack of sugar.

Mike.