Easy blackberry and elderberry wine

Here’s a great hedgerow wine recipe. It needs to be left alone to mature for at least 2 years, mind. No sneaky sips allowed.

It also demonstrates that you don’t need to use fancy yeast to get great results… for this one you can use dried bakers yeast, easily sourced from the back of your cupboard (or pantry*, if you are posh).

First, select your closest blackberry bush and liberate 1.5kg of it’s fruity bounty. Add to this .5kg of elderberries. Remove all insects, then place in a bucket or fermenting bin with 2 litres of boiling water and mash up. (Bare feet NOT recommended).
Cover the bucket/bin and leave for a couple of days, giving it the occasional stir.
Dissolve 1kg of caster sugar in 2.5 litres of boiling water, then add the juice and zest from an orange and a lemon.
Strain the fruit juice through a muslin, and add to the cooled sugar mixture.
Take 2 teaspoons of yeast (a red wine yeast or regular bakers yeast will do) and activate it by mixing it with a little warm water. When the yeasty mixture starts frothing, add it to the fruity mixture and bottle the lot in a demijohn with an airlock.
This should be left to ferment for six months before racking off and bottling.

Et voilà! Un vin dèlicieux digne des lèvres d’un cygne!

* ‘Perhaps the most famous pantry incident in literature was when Mark Twain‘s Tom Sawyer had to do penance for getting into his Aunt Polly’s jam in her pantry: as punishment, he had to white-wash her fence’
The mind boggles…
(Extract from Wikipedia – first port of call for the lazy)

More berry booze?

We’ve got more ace booze recipes for blackberries AND elderberries in our book ‘Brew it Yourself‘. ‘Wild Brandy’ uses both, while our ‘Second Pressing Elderberry Wine’ shows you how to double your booze output for minimal effort.