Elderberries

Several Bunches of Elder Berries in Differing Stages of Ripeness

The first time I tried anything with elderberries I was still living in town.  My friend had two trees and a dog who would eat anything, she’d already lost all of her grapes the year before to this dog. But as elderberries are poisonous before they’re cooked, this was potentially a problem. So she was cutting them all and thought of me.  You see, even in town, I was the kind of person who did this kind of thing.

I was given 2 buckets full of elderberries, one 20 litre and one 10 litre.  I had enough elderberries to be doing just about anything I could think of!

I went on the search for an elderberry wine recipe.  I found a few but I wanted one that didn’t contain a million and one additives.  That’s not how I like to do things.  I found one that I liked and started off.

3 lb Elderberries (stripped from stalks)

1 qt boiling water

1 lb raisins or sultanas

3 lb sugar

Juice of 1 lemon

½ oz yeast 

The recipe even stated that it was easiest to strip the berries from the stalks using a fork – awesome, I wouldn’t have thought of that, not straight away anyway. 

I looked at the two buckets of berries, and decided to start with the smaller one.  I tipped it into the sink and covered it with water to wash the berries and started stripping berries from stalks.  6 hours later, I had about half a kilo of ripe berries, but still a sink full of berries and purple water.  Hubby said he’d do some while I went out that night.  I got up the next morning and said to him “I thought you were going to do some?” He had, he’d spent several hours doing it too.  I made the decision then and there that I would get it done that day, I couldn’t have my kitchen sink out of action for another day, and I was sure it wouldn’t be too good for the berries.  I stopped to take my kids to school, and that was about it.  After another 6 hours still working on the same sink full, I realised that the recipe said nothing about only using the ripe berries – I could leave some of the green berries in, and I also realised that the riper berries sunk, the unripe ones floated, and I really didn’t need every last ripe berry.

After that things went far quicker.  I stripped the berries into the sink and used a sieve to scoop the unripe floaters out and discard them, and then to scoop up the ones from the bottom.

I mashed the berries, and started them soaking with the raisins and went to see my local home brew shop.  I didn’t know what yeast I’d need, and also wasn’t sure if I multiplied the yeast as well as the other ingredients – 3 lb from the recipe had become 6 kg of actual berries – more than four times what the recipe called for.  It was also fun doing the conversions into metric, as there was no clue where the recipe had come from and one lb in the UK does not always equal one lb in the US or one lb Imperial.

The owner of the home brew shop gave me the right yeast, all 5g of it, and told me that it would work for up to 23 litres (mine had made up to 20 litres), and also explained the reason many of the modern recipes call for other additives.  The old fashioned recipes are great, if they work for you, but often are inconsistent or taste like crap.

I followed the instructions and had a barrel full of elderberry wine starting.  It needed sugar tomorrow and then another straining a day or two after that, then to be left until it stopped fermenting.

So I made a large batch of elderberry cordial.  That was much easier, stalks and all go into the pot for that.  We found that the number of cloves in the recipe was far too much and that it could use some lemon, but the kids loved it and everyone swore that it killed a cold faster than anything else they’d tried.  The number of cloves in the recipe below is the reduced amount.

The day after we’d added all the sugar to the wine was the devastating February 22nd earthquake.  The brew barrel was sitting on a bar stool in the corner of my kitchen and I lost about 5 litres of the thick syrupy mix all over the floor with broken plates, glasses and the food that had spread itself out of the pantry.  We had no water and no electricity and absolutely no desire to be inside (in case of more aftershocks) to clean it up.  Hubby stood the barrel up, popped the bubbler back in (it had leaked out through the bubbler) and decided to see what happened with it.

It never bubbled again.  After a few months I was talking to a neighbour who was also a keen brewer.  I was thinking about adding more yeast to see if that made a difference - she recommended more sugar instead.  I did that.

The barrel moved with us out to our lifestyle block and I bottled it out here.  I’ve called it Shockwave and there’s a note about earthquake blended on the labels.  It tastes great, but it’s rocket fuel.  A glass or two and I’m almost asleep.

Last year, I missed our elderberries.  I made plenty of cordial with the flowers, but missed the berries altogether.  This year I’ve been keeping a careful eye on them.  I’m not going to make wine, I’ve still got bottles and bottles of that, but I am out of cordial.

Elderberry Cordial

Fill your pan with Elderberries (leave the stalks on) and barely cover with water.  Simmer until fruit is soft.  Strain.  Return liquid to the pan, adding 500g sugar for every 500 mls of liquid and 1 whole clove per litre.  Heat until sugar is dissolved.  Cool and bottle.

In my first batch, I’ve added a whole orange and a whole lemon while the berries were simmering.  We’ll see how that tastes.  Next batch is brewing now.

The cordial is drunk diluted with water.  It’s nice cold, but better with hot water.  Even my teenagers swore by it for colds and flu.  At the first sign of a sniffle or a cough, Miss Sixteen would start drinking hot elderberry cordials and usually it was all gone within a day.  The bonus is that it tastes far better than the more traditional lemon and honey drink.

A Note About Elderberry Toxicity

Apparently there are two main varieties of Elder Tree.  One has poisonous berries when raw and the other doesn’t.  I find it difficult to tell them apart and as there are complete skeletons of cows underneath two of my trees, I think it’s safer to assume that they’re the toxic variety.  In all honesty, if you’re not sure, assume they’re toxic until cooked.

The skeletons have been there for a while, the grass has grown over one of them, I found it as I was standing on something and kicked at it to see what it was and pulled up a couple of vertebrae, then the puppy dug up the skull.  The other is covered mostly in blackberry and gorse.  As such, my cattle don’t go into those paddocks while the trees are in fruit.