Elderberry vodka

You may remember that last month I encouraged everybody to pick elderberries as well as blackberries for making tasty things with.  Well, it's now October, and impatient little minx that I am I have brought my booze out of its vats a month early and bottled it in its final form.

When I picked my elderberries in mid-August I had about 800g of them, and decided to make a liqueur by using them to flavour some vodka.  I'm a sucker for purple booze!  A litre of vodka was therefore bought and I simply chucked all the ripe berries into it, sealed the containers and added sticky labels encouraging me to NOT OPEN TIL NOV. 15TH to allow for maximum flavour.

Needless to say the stickies did nothing - I was too tempted to move on with my experiment!  Today I filtered out the berries from my vodka, heated it gently in a large pan and added about 200g of sugar.  I wanted quite a strongly flavoured drink this time round (my blackberry liqueurs were very jammy) but you could add more sugar per litre if you like - just keep tasting 'til you go yum!  

When bottling, stand the bottle on a wad of kitchen towels and ladle into the bottles through a funnel if your pan has no spout.  This should minimise drips.

This all yielded a little more than 1L of finished product, which means I got to use a very small and unusually-shaped bottle for the excess which might make an amusing Christmas present for someone.  Come to that, small jars of jam or chutney or bottles of interesting drink would all make amusing Christmas presents, which should be another encouraging reason to get crafty!

Ways with Blackberries and Elderberries: Liqueurs

Blackberries.  We all know and love eating them, especially in crumbles, pies and jam - which I made later, as you'll see.  But this year's harvest was motivated by that finest of things: strongly flavoured, sweet, ladylike ALCOHOL.

At a party many weeks ago now I ordered a Bramble from the bar, a combination of Bombay Sapphire gin, lemon juice and blackberry liqueur - Creme de Mures.  Don't ask me the proportions, all I know is that they're delicious and I shared my love of them with some friends.  One said that it was tasty, but that she'd prefer a vodka-based drink to gin, not being a gin fan.  From then on my quest was sealed - I must make Sue some blackberry vodka, and some thicker, more traditional creme for making my own Brambles at home!

To the interwebs I went, and scoured many websites (most of them, to my despair, American, and obsessed with 'cups') to find the best recipes.  With these in mind I scoured many bushes on Wimbledon Common, looking for the blackest and least spider-covered fruit.

TOP TIP:  When you are going blackberrying, take with you a very large container - even if you don't fill it it's easier to chuck berries into from a small distance without missing - and the kitchen scissors.  With these you can manipulate thorny branches and cut away large leaves to reveal hidden berries, and reach your hand through to gather in safety.  If possible, don't wear a Gore-Tex raincoat as I did, they catch thorns worse than anything on the planet.

Along the way I also managed to chop down many bunches of elderberries from nearby carparks.  Pluck these in entire bunches and de-stem in the kitchen, or if you need more room in your containers take a break from harvesting to bibble the berries off at leisure on a grassy knoll.  Don't eat the red or green ones - they're a bit cyanidey, but the ripe black ones are fine!

Haha!  Bounty collected, I applied conversion charts to the wretched 'cups' of my recipes and acquired the requisite amount of alcohol and sugar.  I now present the two recipes I used, each delicious in its own way, each suitable for scaling up or down to suit your own harvest.

Creme de Mures with red wine


1.5 kg blackberries
2 litres of good red wine
large amounts of sugar

large tub
large bowl
large saucepan
FUNNEL
bottles

Soak any labels off the bottles.  Wash and crush the fruit, add the wine and 'macerate' (basically soak) for 48 hours.  You should be able to do this in the tub you used to gather the berries.  Weigh a large bowl; filter the juice into it and calculate the weight of the juice.  Add the same weight of sugar to the liquid.  Bring to the boil and boil for five minutes; allow to cool, and bottle.  A funnel is essential; place the bottle on a wad of kitchen paper to make clearing up spills easy, or bottle over the sink.

Creme de Mures with Vodka


1kg blackberries
1 litre vodka
1/4 litres water
350g sugar

Wash and crush the fruit, add the vodka, and macerate 24 hours.  Strain, reserve the vodka, and put the strained fruit into the water for another 24 hours.  Strain this mixture and add the sugar to the water.  Mix with the vodka, and bottle.

Elderberry Cassis


Remember those elderberries?  Well, I was also looking at cassis recipes, figuring that if anything was a kindred spirit of these tiny black fragrant fruits it was blackcurrants.  Unfortunately I shan't know until November, following the recipe, whether my experiment with elderberry cassis was successful, so I shall save that post for later.  At the moment I have two bottles of vodka filled with slowly paling berries, the liquid getting purpler and purpler every day.  It looks promising....!

Waste and Plenty

A break from knitting now, as I make the most of the summer harvest.  In the next few weeks I'll be posting five recipes using blackberries, elderberries and apple which I've been testing out this August.  Unfortunately in my desire to use up a disposable camera so that I can show you photos of these creations, I'll have delayed posting until the end of the berry season - but there's always next year!

Where I live there are innumerable old-fashioned Victorian and Georgian houses, all with a little garden, and there is a huge amount of fruit going to waste in those gardens.  From my flat I can only dream of having a real apple or plum tree to harvest; even a crab apple tree would provide jelly to serve with meats.  The Christian Science Church on the main road has a sloe tree in their front carpark; the branches of dull bitter berries are too high for me to reach without a scrumping ladder, and the fruit which might have gone to gin is rotting on the pavement, squished by passing women with buggies.  Elderberry bushes are rampant in front yards and back yards everywhere.  It is simply criminal.  None of these lucky, lucky people are taking advantage of the free jam, pudding and liqueur-making facilities at their command!

I address my plea to the Internet at large.  Soon it will be September, and almost all but the apples will have gone, Summer's bounty withered for another year.  Next year, when you see a red or purple glint on that bush that leans over the fence, investigate it properly.  If the bottom of the bush belongs to you, go to it!  If it doesn't, bring a ladder, and drop me a line...