Sam Avery: Making homemade elderflower champers

Sam Avery, comedian and former guest editor of 4Laughs, is a wannabe rock star and budding gourmet. Here he tries his hand at the ever-popular elderflower champagne recipe from 4Food’s Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall…

When I hear the word homebrew, it’s impossible to forget my dad’s numerous failed attempts when I was a toddler to put our family name on the real ale map (I haven’t checked although there probably is one). One of his worst efforts turned our house into a battle zone with my mum chasing me out the front door after I knocked over a vat of his ‘finest’ gunk. The kitchen smelt like a John West tuna factory for a week.

So this was a chance for me to have a crack at it myself and I felt pretty damn cocky as I printed off the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s elderflower champagne recipe. But the first problem I had was locating some elderflowers. How hard could this be? Unfortunately, all the fields near me were completely elder-less so I was reduced to the less than dignified act of trying to sniff some out.

“Pssst. You got any elderflowers? Hey, hey, keep it quiet man…”
In the end I lucked out as my girlfriend’s mum came up trumps with a big bag of the beauties. I was on my way…

The trip to the hardware shop for equipment was a real experience. I’ve just hit the ripe old age of 31 and I wondered why I’d not spent a Sunday in this haven of delights before now. (Screw you Alton Towers, this is my retreat now.) I marvelled at the array of buckets, gasped at the selection of funnels and glass bottles, and fantasised about brewing up enough to give as gifts to all my friends. I relayed this to my girlfriend and she looked at me like I’d just slapped an orphan. Maybe I was getting ahead of myself.

My only hope for the champers was that it would be drinkable. Not tasty. Not even memorable. Just bog standard drinkable. There’s a certain rustic charm to making any food or drink from scratch and the frustrated caveman within me certainly came to the fore as I lashed hot water into the bucket and aggressively mixed it up with the sugar. That animal feeling pretty much evaporated as I scraped the zest of lemon into the mix and tossed the flower-heads around like a culinary version of Morrissey.

I had forgotten to buy any muslin so an old tea towel was used to cover the mix. This brought on a wave of anxiety as my sensible side told me I was already flirting with failure by not following the rulebook. But I was caring enough to check on my baby and add some yeast when it looked exactly the same two days later. When the time came to sieve and decant into the bottles there was a strong but not unpleasant fruity-chemical odour emanating from the bucket, like a packet of Starbursts doused in Lynx Java.

To prevent any explosive ‘incidents’ as experienced by some users of this site, I carefully carried the bottles to my garage, handling them as if they were grenades. Whilst doing this I loudly whistled a happy tune to diffuse any of my on-looking neighbours’ fears that I may actually be a terrorist. Then came the waiting game…

A week is a long time to wait for a drink, especially one you’ve brewed yourself. Despite still having a suspiciously murky green colour to it, the brew smelt and tasted OK – very tangy, sweet and quite thick for a Champagne, but definitely drinkable. Hurrah! Job done! I’ve given a couple of bottles to friends who’ve seemed less than grateful so far, but for a first effort it’s not half bad.

So, I’m off to neck a bottle in the car park – who’s with me?

Try Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s elderflower champagne recipe for yourself.

View Sam’s step by step guide to making elderflower Champagne.

Permalink||(0) Comments