brewing 2ne1

elderflower champagne - batch #2

2009-06-14 Sunday - This morning I gathered elderflowers for a second 5 gallon batch of champagne. The flowers are starting to fade around our house so I’m glad I didn’t wait any longer. I’m also collecting more 2 L plastic soda bottles and hope to find about six more to get ready for bottling.

Same recipe and technique as before, except only using the natural yeast this time (no added winemaking yeast (see update below) and 2kg of sugar instead of 2.3kg as last time. Starting SG 1.032. I’m curious if it will turn out the same with only a single 2 kg bag of sugar, which would make the recipe simpler.

Update 2009-06-18 - No fermentation yet so I added 0.3 kg more sugar and removed the flowers and peels. For some reason this time the flowers and peels didn’t float, they all sunk to the bottom and stayed there. Never noticed that in previous batches.

Stirred well (SG 1.04ish) and sprinkled 1 tsp of winemaking yeast. Next morning there were bubbles - thank you! Perhaps it would have happened on its own, but I wanted to be sure since we were leaving for a long weekend away.

Update 2009-06-23  - Still fermenting slowly so I racked it and was going to bottle but then noticed it wasn’t quite ready. Tastes good and similar to previous batches. So will wait a couple days to bottle. SG near 1.03. Still have four 2 L bottles of previous batch so the stocks are ok at the moment!

Cheers, Jason