Thought i'd share my weekend with the elderberries. It's not beer, but it was a brewday so i thought i'd post it for your viewing pleasure
After discovering some ripe elderberries at the end of my garden (which i thought was a very convenient indicator that they're now in season :) ) SWMBO and i set out bright and early on saturday morning and collected a 5 gal bucket full of elderberries after about 2 hours.
we then set out to seperate the berries from their stalks. being careful to pick out the green (unripe) ones and making sure none of the stalks fell into the bucket, as this creates a very bitter taste
3 hours later, we were done and our hands were purple hehe
we had 7 kilos of berries :)
i got my beer brewing boiler out and filled it to the top with water, added a campden tablet and brought it to the boil. the boiling water then went into the fermenter full of berries and was left over night to stew.
i then ran off the juices threw a sieve with a muslin bag to make doubly sure nothing solid got through
realising i'd only collected about 3 gals of juice, it figured i needed to press the berries, and tried to do this with my hands and a plate
but it didn't work and the tap kept getting blocked, so instead used the plate to hold back the berries to collect the last of the juice
i still only managed 4 gals of juice from this. so i then took a slightly drastic measure and put all the berries into muslin bags, took off my shoe and sock, and went old school on them!! this worked a treat and i managed to collect just over 5 gals of juice. sorry no pic of my pressing in motion, but this was the state of my foot and garage floor afterward!
my hands weren't so pretty either
all of the juices were then chucked in my boiler, along with 4 kilos of cane sugar, juice of 5 lemons, juice of 5 oranges, and 20 cloves.
this was then brought to a gentle boil and skimmed regularly to take out the crud. i had a jelly like layer on the top at one point. here's a few more pics:
this was then chilled with my wort chiller down to pitching temperature.
OG was 1.085 and pitched with uBrew wine yeast.
the adicic nature of this brew cleaned my boiler a treat!!! it looks brand new again hehe.
After discovering some ripe elderberries at the end of my garden (which i thought was a very convenient indicator that they're now in season :) ) SWMBO and i set out bright and early on saturday morning and collected a 5 gal bucket full of elderberries after about 2 hours.
we then set out to seperate the berries from their stalks. being careful to pick out the green (unripe) ones and making sure none of the stalks fell into the bucket, as this creates a very bitter taste
3 hours later, we were done and our hands were purple hehe
we had 7 kilos of berries :)
i got my beer brewing boiler out and filled it to the top with water, added a campden tablet and brought it to the boil. the boiling water then went into the fermenter full of berries and was left over night to stew.
i then ran off the juices threw a sieve with a muslin bag to make doubly sure nothing solid got through
realising i'd only collected about 3 gals of juice, it figured i needed to press the berries, and tried to do this with my hands and a plate
but it didn't work and the tap kept getting blocked, so instead used the plate to hold back the berries to collect the last of the juice
i still only managed 4 gals of juice from this. so i then took a slightly drastic measure and put all the berries into muslin bags, took off my shoe and sock, and went old school on them!! this worked a treat and i managed to collect just over 5 gals of juice. sorry no pic of my pressing in motion, but this was the state of my foot and garage floor afterward!
my hands weren't so pretty either
all of the juices were then chucked in my boiler, along with 4 kilos of cane sugar, juice of 5 lemons, juice of 5 oranges, and 20 cloves.
this was then brought to a gentle boil and skimmed regularly to take out the crud. i had a jelly like layer on the top at one point. here's a few more pics:
this was then chilled with my wort chiller down to pitching temperature.
OG was 1.085 and pitched with uBrew wine yeast.
the adicic nature of this brew cleaned my boiler a treat!!! it looks brand new again hehe.