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Ale Beer Champagne

Elderflower Beer Ale

A Little Brewing Experiment

How to brew elderflower beer at home

It’s the time of a season for many flowering plants and trees which we can hand-pick and make all sorts of things to our benefit and good health.

One of those is Elderflower Tree.

Elderflower is very healthy and delicious when it’s flowering, and because its pollen apart from other things contains the sort of natural yeast which makes it perfect for making the elderflower fizzy ale, beer, or even wine.

The flowers are around just for a few weeks and go away quite quickly, turning to also delicious and perhaps even healthier elderberries. So we have to act quickly if we want to make the best out of the short season.

That’s why we are going to do a little experiment making elderflower beer first without beer brewing yeasts, and then with beer brewing yeasts, and we will see and compare the difference between those two, which one is tastier.

Elderflower Beer/Ale Recipe Instructions:

 

The first thing that we had to do is to go out in nature to find and pick the flowers of the elderflower tree. It’s better to avoid to pick from places besides the highly frequent road because of pollution from cars.

Depending on how much of beer or ale you want to do, for 5 litres of water, you should use about 10 – 15 average-sized flowers. So if you intend to do the 25 litres which is the common size of the beer fermenting barrel, you’d need to pick only about 60 elderflowers which will take you about 15 minutes depending on how big tree and how many flowers there are of course.

Then you let them out from the bag and spread them somewhere in shed or garden, the best is to put them on some large mesh, so it’s airy and unwanted bugs and other insects get out. After a few hours put the flowers into the barrel, close the lid, and leave it there for about 48 hours. Then open it up and strain it from the big flowers and bits through the strainer or sieve, and then do it again through the fine cloth, the best what works for me is women tights. The second strain is to get rid of tiny bits that fell through the strainer such as tiny elderflower bugs that are always in there.

“While I was in the process of making elderflower ale and elderflower beer and recently had to deal with removing those tiny bugs from the wort even though I tried to clean the flowers from bugs before I put them in the barrel. The perfect way to remove tiny bugs from the fermenting wort is to use the muslin bag wrapped around the big strainer. Strainer itself has too big holes and bugs pass right through it but the muslin bag or women tights do the perfect job in removing bugs or other tiny particles from the liquid :)”

Once the liquid is clear, we can start adding the juice from squeezed limes and lemons, again strained through fine cloth/tights so there are not any bits, and add LME, sugar, or/and honey.

It’s up to each person’s taste, but what I have personally done is I used a can of Ultra Light Malt Extract (which is normally added instead of sugar when making beer to gain better taste), and 1kg of pure honey to give it nice honey taste and flavour too.

Mix it all well so the syrup and honey dissolved in the wort, and close the lid, put on the airlock, and keep the still warm temperature of about 20 – 24 degrees celsius. After about 2 or 3 days, the airlock starts bubbling, which means it’s fermenting and everything goes by the plan.

After a few more days I added the chopped lime, lemon, and orange peel with a handful of gun powder loose green tea. Again, I used the tights as a sack where I put the chopped citrus skins and a handful of green tea and place it in the wort. Make sure to tie it tight so nothing falls out in the wort. Leave it in for a maximum of 48 hours and take it out, and we can throw it away and properly wash out the sack so we can reuse it the next time we need it.

Now, just as with every ale or beer, we must wait until the airlock bubbles, and then check if the gravity is below recommended measure to bottle the elderflower beer.


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