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| 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.
