Elderflower champagne recipe

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Simonh82

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I'm having my first go at making elderflower champagne. I normally make beer so wines are a new venture for me.

I cobbled the recipe together from examples I'd seen on the web and tips on a couple of forum posts.

For 11L volume into the fermentor:
50 elderflower heads
3L apple juice (couldn't find grape juice in the supermarket so went for a cidery vibe)
Zest and juice of 8 lemons
1.7kg of table sugar.

I left the elderflowers steeping in water overnight with a campden tablet then added the lemons, apple juice and sugar. I aerated well and pitched 1 pack of Wilko ale yeast, which is at least clean fermenting if kept cool (I thought I had some wine yeast but alas not).

It has a starting gravity of 1.065 and the sample tasted amazing. Does this sound like a reasonable recipe? If it ferments to dry what would my final gravity likely to be? Brewer's Friend is only set up for beer and can't handle dry wines which might go below 1.000.

Thanks!
 
If you stop this at 0.990 it will be about 9.8%.
That just makes it in to wine classification. Below 8.5% is a strong cider.


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If you stop this at 0.990 it will be about 9.8%.
That just makes it in to wine classification. Below 8.5% is a strong cider.


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Will it go as low as 0.990? I thought you would need a higher starting gravity to produce enough ethanol to get that low. How do you stop fermentation? Will it not ferment out the sugar completely?
 
Will it go as low as 0.990? I thought you would need a higher starting gravity to produce enough ethanol to get that low. How do you stop fermentation? Will it not ferment out the sugar completely?



It could go that low , guess depends on what yeast. I did a Prosecco type brew that went under 1.000.
You stop with stabiliser but if you're wanting a fizzy wine or cider you don't want to do that. As you want fizz up when you bottle.


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I thought I would let it ferment out completely then batch prime it with enough sugar to aim for about 3 volumes of CO2. Not really champagne levels of carbonation but as it will be going in swing top bottles I don't want to push it too far.
 
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