How to make Elderberry Wine

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Moley

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Warning: Elderberry is a long-term wine, it might be drinkable in 6 months but I'm starting this in September 2010 and don't expect it to be properly ready until Christmas 2011.

There are many recipes in books and on the internet for Elderberry wine, and the method should always be fairly similar, but all recipes can be modified according to what ingredients you have to hand. The raisins and grape juice are my own twist and can be regarded as optional extras.

You will need a bucket with lid, a DJ, PET or other suitable closed fermenter with airlock, a sieve, a funnel, a straining bag (nylon or muslin), a long handled spoon (plastic or stainless steel) and a potato masher.

Ingredients for 1 gallon:

3 lbs Elderberries
1 kg (or thereabouts) Sugar
200g (or thereabouts) Raisins (optional)
500ml Red Grape Juice (optional)
1 Lemon
Boiling water to 6 pints
1 tsp Pectolase
Red Wine Yeast or GP Yeast Compound & Nutrient

All recipes can be scaled up or down, with the exception of the yeast. If using sachets, one sachet will usually do for up to 5 gallons, if using compounds, 1 tsp for 1 gallon, 2 tsps for 5 gallons.

Elderberries look like this, pick them when the berries are almost black and the stalks have turned purple.

PB10091901.jpg


Some people have said to freeze them and shake the berries off, I still favour the old method of combing the berries off the stalks through the prongs of a fork. Try a few forks until you find one which removes the most berries with the least amount of stalk. The fork would usually be in my right hand but that presented me with a problem of how to hold the camera.

PB10091902.jpg


Periodically, skim off and discard any floaters, unripe, over-ripe, and the occasional insect.

PB10091903.jpg


Elderberries are free, which is my favourite price for winemaking ingredients, but I'll be honest with you, stripping them from their stalks can be a pain and I certainly wouldn't want to do 15 lbs in one go, so I've been picking them over the course of a week, stripping, washing, sorting, sieving and freezing.

A gallon's worth is just under a 2 litre ice cream tub

PB10091905.jpg


It turned out that I'd got 6 lbs in this latest batch, so my plans got scaled up. Those went into my FV and were attacked with a potato masher. In the meantime I got another 9 lbs out of the freezer ....

PB10091906.jpg


.... covered them with boiling water and heated them gently. These were also mashed, and the pan brought not quite to the boil. Don't use any sort of electric blender, you don't want to break all of the pips.

The contents of that pan plus a couple of gallons of boiling water went into my FV.

I rinsed the vegetable oil off a kilo of raisins, blitzed them in a food processor and added those to the FV, together with 2 sliced lemons (all I had got) and 1 tbsp of citric acid. I also added 3 litres of red grape juice. The raisins will improve the body of the wine, the grape juice is optional but I'd got some and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

PB10091908.jpg


When cooled to 25C I added pectolase, yeast and nutrient. I have used a Gervin GV2 wine yeast, which claims to be particularly suitable for full bodied red and white wines, but any GP or red wine yeast would suffice.

Leave in the bucket for 3 days, stirring the fruit cap back in at least twice daily.

Straining

Dead easy but can be a bit messy. It should go without saying that everything which touches your wine needs to be well washed and sterilised/disinfected.

The basic set-up is jug, sieve, straining bag, funnel, fermenter:

PB10092201.jpg


A nylon straining bag is ideal but might cost around 5. It could last many years if you look after it. Use it with the seam on the outside, wash it thoroughly immediately after use and boil it in a large saucepan of water for 10 minutes before use. Unfortunately, last weekend I was straining something else, squeezed the bag of pulp a bit too hard and put my finger through it. However, it had lasted me many years. My HBS sell muslin/cheesecloth straining/grain bags for around 20p and I usually keep a few in stock, so I used a double thickness of those.

Best practice is probably to boil your sugar to a syrup with half a litre of water to every kilo of sugar (1 pint to 2 lbs), allow to cool and pour that into your fermenter, although you could just dump the sugar in dry, strain onto it and stir later.

When you take the lid off the bucket you will probably find a crust of fruit on the top, so I skim off the majority and squeeze the juices through the sieve with a spoon:

PB10092202.jpg


If you're making wine on a larger scale, don't discard that pulp but put it into another FV or some other sterilised container for now.

Now it's just a matter of jugging the rest of the must plus pulp through the sieve into the bag:

PB10092203.jpg


Some fruits disintegrate into mush, so the bag might clog after a while, and it also helps to lift the bag just slightly clear of the funnel and see-saw the fabric from side to side. Elderberries are mostly skin and pips and this one should flow through the bag quite easily.

That's it, fit an airlock and let those yeasties get on with their job. If using a DJ or PET don't overfill for now but top up after a few days. Fermentation should take 2-4 weeks, leave it for at least another week when airlock activity has ceased, rack, put away somewhere cool for a couple of months, rack again, put away somewhere cool and forget about it for a while.

Try to keep this out of the light, wrap the fermenter in brown paper or throw a black dustbin bag over it.

I had to do this but wasn't really in the mood, could probably have squeezed another pint or two of juice out of this pulp, but I already have rather a lot of wine on-the-go so I didn't bother.
PB10092204.jpg


However, if you return that to an FV, add half the original volume of cold water and give it another few days, you can quite often get a second, lighter mash.

To all blokes with female partners: Don't forget to clean up / mop the floor afterwards.
 
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Hi Moley, a timely how to guide, :cheers: just whats needed. Started mine this afternoon, 17lb berries, 1/2 kilo raisins and 1 kilo sugar to start with, waiting for it to cool down before hoying into fv, cheers Dave ps is the acid realy needed, i havent any
 
Great one Moley a post i will be following keenly going to start 5 gallons in the morning.
Can you please confirm on thing, when you say 1/2 a litre of red grape juice is that red grape juice from the super market.


Cheers Graham.
 
Dave: Elderberries are middling on acid, I think you should be adding some citric or squeezing a couple of lemons.

Graham: That's supermarket grape juice I've added, which is entirely my modification, I've never seen it in any published recipe. Add it, ignore it or substitute a small can of red grape concentrate if making a larger batch, it's your choice.
 
Did I once read somewhere that some elderberries are not suitable for wine??
I was told to pick the ones that the birds were eating as the others are sour. :hmm:

Anyone else know of this??

BB
 
Seems to be lots of rumours about elderberries being poisonous and they do taste awful when not fully ripe, just skim the unripe floaters.

Another cracking how to Moley :clap:
 
Chears Moley, will get some acid today, Dave NE
 
Did I once read somewhere that some elderberries are not suitable for wine??
I was told to pick the ones that the birds were eating as the others are sour.

Elerberies are circumglobal and there are several species. In North America, there are both edible and inedible species. Fortunatly, it seems that the poisonous ones are red and any with black fruit can safely be used for wine. Most of the stuff about them being poisonous probably comes from US websites warning people against making preserves or wines with the red ones.

All my FV's are now in use so if I pick a few more, I just might have a crack at some apple and elderberry jam.
 
if you put the fruit into tights in the f.v. then it saves alot of hassle when it comes to straining this goes for all fruits, i do it with all my fruit wines and it makes squeezing fruit alot easier plus its any awful lot easier to strain as tou have all the fruit tied up in a bag
 
I see you're using the same FV as me, Moley. I'm wondering about siphoning it as the sediment will not be too easy to see from the side. How do you do it?
 
They are a right pain in the **** when it comes to racking.

You can buy extra-long syphoning sticks but I extend the rigid section of my standard syphon set-up by lashing some suitable stick or a long spoon handle to the flexible tube and the first couple of inches of the rigid section using cable ties or freezer twists.

Then I'm afraid it's guesswork, I start the flow and drop the output end into a receiving jar, gradually lower the sediment cup into the fermenter keeping it held against the side wall so I can see where it is until it's down to the last gallon or so, and then it's a case of standing over the fermenter and watching down the neck as I tilt the fermenter and lower the syphon tube on a stick towards the gunk.

I always rack to clear DJs so I'll be able to see what I'm doing when it comes to second racking. Remember to keep them in the dark or wrap them.
 
An excellent thread!

I set my own elderberry concoction going around a month ago and even though it's pretty much finished fermenting it tastes absolutely awful. But as with most country wines and in particular elderberry, it's a completely different wine after a year. :-)

If you make elderberry wine and you have a wee taste, don't despair - it'll improve brilliantly!
 
granda said:
if you put the fruit into tights in the f.v. then it saves alot of hassle when it comes to straining this goes for all fruits, i do it with all my fruit wines and it makes squeezing fruit alot easier plus its any awful lot easier to strain as tou have all the fruit tied up in a bag
I bet the misses isn't too happy about this though :lol:
 
Not wishing to preach to the master, i have a suggestion on blitzing the raisins.

Mine always seem to clog up brenda (my blenda) so if you add the sugar at the same time it seems to make a gritty paste rather than a clumpy block of raisin pulp.

Great post and keep them comming.

neil
 
Nice tip, I will give that a try next time :thumb:

However, it's only rarely that I use the food processor, the odd few ounces get chopped with a knife on a board but larger quantities go through an old fashioned mincer.
 
My mother made some Elderberry wine years ago when i was a nipper - it was in a cupboard in our bedroom for 5 years that i know of until me n the bro drunk it one day and got smashed as rats in a barrel!! :cheers:

Anyway :thumb: a tip for elderberry - i got this from some old guys who used to run allotments near mine in york - Low moor.
There are loads of elderberry trees on there opposite the Uni and they all fruit, but these guys said to me the best thing to do is walk round in spring time when the trees are in flower, grab a bunch of the flowers and rub into your hands then sniff them.
They said the best elderberrys come from the trees that the flowers smell of cats P**s when rubbed in your hand!! :thumb:
 
:wha: I thought all elderflowers smelt of cat ****, or do you mean the best berries come from the ones which smell of tom cat?



Sorry, I'm just sampling last January's parsnip prior to bottling it, with a small splash of grape juice it's a winner :drunk:
 
Lol not sure Moley apparently they dont all smell the same - just going off what the old boys told me a while back. Good how to BTW. Trying to source some seeds at the mo' too and sloes see if i can grow em here.
Must admit not made any elderberry but fancy a go sometime plus i think elderberrys are used in port too.
May have to wait a while for them to grow and produce fruit as not seen any over here as im on the coast more or less and it gets really hot in summer. But have a nice shaded side to villa which doesnt get much sun and had a stream running past it.
 
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