Elderberry and Blackberry wine recipe - Homebrew

Elderberry and  BlackBerry wine  – our first attempt!

This recipe for elderberry and blackberry wine was a fluke wine that turned out alright considering it was our first time making wine.

For the wine itself we used

Approx 900g Elderberries

Approx 600g Blackberries

1.5kg of sugar ( sweet wine)

Water

1 sachet all purpose red wine yeast

1 tsp yeast nutrient

1 tsp citric acid

1 Camden tablet

2 tsp pectolyase
This recipe is a combination of both BlackBerry and elderberries as they are ready almost at the same time of year. The elderberries were a lot of effort to collect and de-stem soo if you are lazy go for fewer elderberries and more blackberries or just all blackberries. Soo far the wine tastes and smells like a port style wine. But I’m no wine fan – so if it is a good wine or a bad one. I don’t know!

Neither I nor Richard even drinks wine so we have to rely on other people for their opinions but soo far people have like it. Even at its young age!

We collected the blackberries and elderberries from our treasure trove medieval orchard in august. We left them in the freezer for a few days to help the fruit break down once defrosted.

Method

I roughly picked over the stems and any unripe fruits from the pickings and put them into a sterilized container. I mashed them with a sterilized masher.

Next, I added the sugar to the bucket and poured over 1 litre of boiling water and stirred until the sugar dissolved.

I then topped up with cool water until it was at about 1 gallon. I added some pectolyase and a Camden tablet to the mix and left for 24 hours.

Once it had been 24 hours I added the yeast nutrient and yeast and put in a warm place to ferment for about a week.

After about a week I strained through a very fine cheesecloth into a 1-gallon cheese cloth and topped up with cooled boiled water.  I added a sterilized bung filled with sterilization fluid to the demijohn and left for approx 6 weeks for the second fermentation.

After approx 6 weeks we siphoned off the liquid into a clean demijohn and left the lees at the bottom. Again topping up with cooled boiled water and fitting a bung with sterilization fluid.

I then left it for about another 6 weeks and racked it off again and repeated the same process as before.

Once the wine seemed to have stopped I tested with a hydrometer and it indicated ‘bottle’. Then I decide to stop the fermentation with Camden tablets and bottle in dark green bottles.