Can anyone help me please?

[Jnay]

Hi
I have made some elderflower cordial and I just had a little taste before I was about to bottle it and it is SO Sweet. I mean like really way too sweet.

Is there anything I can do .

I thought of adding more water but that would take the elderflower taste away.

I would really appreciate any help..

Thank you

 

[stickman]

Sweetness is usually balanced against tartness or acid. Pull a sample and add small amounts of tartaric or acid blend etc and taste to see if you can reach a balance point.

 

[FTC Wines]

Jnay, I had the same problem with a blackberry port I made, TOO sweet. Only thing I could think of was to make a dry version and blend the two. Did that & the results are great! Roy

 

[Arne]

We could probably use a little more information, specific gravitys, a little as to how the ferment ended, did you backsweeten? Anyway, if you sweetened it, you can"t take the sugar back out. If you stabalized it, you probably can't get it to restart and take some of the sweeteness out by refermenting. That kind of leaves you with blending it with a less sweet wine, either another flavor or make some more elderflower and mix them. I know this is probably not what you want to hear, but they are the only ways I know to knock some of the sweetness out of wines. Hopfully someone else will come along with another idea, but I don't know what it mite be. Good luck with it, Arne.

 

[Arne]

LOL, you are getting all the answers at the same time. I didn't think of trying to add a bit of acid. Arne.

 

[JohnT]

Jnay, I had the same problem with a blackberry port I made, TOO sweet. Only thing I could think of was to make a dry version and blend the two. Did that & the results are great! Roy

FTC, This is the route I would take. Additional acid would help in balancing out the sweetness, but I find that the lower PH, plus the higher alcohol content really bothers my stomach.

 

[Jnay]

Hi there,

Thank you all so much for replying.

This is elderflower cordial I'm making for when my grand children visit me from the UK in summer.

This year I tried Hugh Fernley Whittingstalls recipe and it's just too sweet.

Sorry if I've spelt his name wrong lol

I've just got another 50 elderflower heads and steeped them in boiling water, zest of 4 lemons and the juice of the lemons.

I was told to boil this mix tomorrow, simmer for 2 mins then add it to the too sweet mix to blend them both together.

The kids love the elderflower taste .

Do you think this will work

Thanks again for all your help everyone, every kind of you sell to take the time xxxx

 

[sour_grapes]

Again, why don't you tell us the recipe you used. (Not the NAME of the recipe, the recipe itself.)

 

[Jnay]

Hi
This is the recipe I used , I doubled it up though as I wanted to make more

About 25 elderflower heads
Finely grated zest of 3 unwaxed lemons and 1 orange, plus their juice (about 150ml in total)
1kg sugar
1 heaped tsp citric acid (optional)

Inspect the elderflower heads carefully and remove any insects. Place the flower heads in a large bowl together with the orange and lemon zest.
Bring 1.5 litres water to the boil and pour over the elderflowers and citrus zest. Cover and leave overnight to infuse.

Strain the liquid through a scalded jelly bag or piece of muslin and pour into a saucepan. Add the sugar, the lemon and orange juice and the citric acid (if using).

Heat gently to dissolve the sugar, then bring to a simmer and cook for a couple of minutes.

Use a funnel to pour the hot syrup into sterilised bottles. Seal the bottles with swing-top lids, sterilised screw-tops or corks.

 

[cmason1957]

Not to be much of a smart-aleck or anything, and I hope you just didn't put this in your recipe. But I see no mention of adding any yeast. Without yeast, you just have sugar water.

 

[Jnay]

Hi cmason,
It's elderflower cordial I'm making for my grand children.

I've never put yeast into it hun

 

[sour_grapes]

I've just got another 50 elderflower heads and steeped them in boiling water, zest of 4 lemons and the juice of the lemons.

I was told to boil this mix tomorrow, simmer for 2 mins then add it to the too sweet mix to blend them both together.

Do you think this will work

Yes, that sounds like a fine idea. I could suggest two things to guide you to make success more likely.

(1) if you have access to a hydrometer (about $5 at a Home Brewing store), you could measure the specific gravity (SG) of the too-sweet mixture. You could also mix up a glass of something that you consider to have the correct sweetness, and measure its SG as well. Also, measure the SG of the new, unsweetened mixture, although this should be close to 1.000. Then you could use a Pearson's square to figure out how much of each mixture to blend together to get the desired SG (which will correlate very closely with sweetness).

(2) if you don't want to do that, I would suggest making bench trials of mixtures of the two to figure out how much of each to use. Say, fill 1/3 of a glass with the unsweetened mix, then blend in more and more of the too-sweet mix until you like it, keeping track of how much you added.

Finally, a comment: This forum is called winemakingtalk.com; in common parlance, a cordial contains alcohol; and some people who are grandchildren are of legal drinking age. Hence our confusion.

 

[Jnay]

Hi sour grapes,

I will measure the sweetness of last years batch and the batch I made yesterday and compare then.

I have a new batch steeping now as well.


Great idea, thank you very much

 

[BernardSmith]

Hi Jnay. 1.5 liters = .4 gallon and 1 kg of sugar = 2.2 lbs. A pound of sugar in one gallon of water is equivalent to a specific gravity of about 1.040. So 2.2 lbs = about 1.090 but you have used only 0.4 of a US gallon so that more than doubles the gravity - so your gravity is about 1.180. That is very, very, very sweet. What I might do if I were you is to look for some dried elderflowers and add about 2 oz of dried flowers to about 3 L of boiling water.*** You might then add the lemon, orange and citric acid Then allow that tea to cool and add this to your cordial. The result will be about 1 gallon of cordial with a sweetness equivalent to a gravity of about 1.040. If that is not sweet enough - and it may not be - then you might bench test the addition of sugar to find a level of sweetness that you prefer.

*** I make elderflower wine and I use about 2 oz of dried flowers to 1 US gallon. You can find dried elderflowers at Amazon

 

[Jnay]

Hi Bernard Smith,

Thank you for giving me help.

Can I ask you why I should use dried elderflowers please hun?

It's just that I have a field full of elders in flower right now, I love using fresh ones. Are dried elderflowers more potent?

Thanks again

 

[stickman]

After seeing the recipe, I agree with the others about the sugar content being too high; it looks to be in the 50% w/v range. Looking at typical values for juice you might expect the sugar content to be in the 9% to 16% range. As mentioned by others above, do some test dilutions in a glass to see how much unsweetened mix you'll need for your taste, but I'm speculating that you'll have to dilute near a factor of 4.

 

[BernardSmith]

I simply suggested using dried flowers as I have no idea where you live (not even the continent) so I have no idea whether elderflowers are still available for harvesting or whether you are picking berries or are buried in a foot of snow. I just planted two elderberry bushes last night with the hope of getting enough flowers in a year or two to make my elderflower wine from our own freshly picked flowers

 

[Jnay]

Hi Bernard Smith,

I'm in Co Mayo in Ireland

The elderflowers are just in flower here now.

We planted 8 elders in the field behind our house last year, they are still babies yet but there are about 16 massive elders in the field too so I'm taking them from the elder elders haha


Thanks again x

 

[BernardSmith]

I was over in Dublin last week (stopped over while visiting my daughter in Cardiff). Grew up in Scotland then lived in London for about five years, many years ago which was where I was introduced to elderflower and elderberry wine. Elderflower wine is among my favorites but if you make wine from the flowers you don't have the berries.

 

[Jnay]

Bernard Smith you've travelled a lot lol

I have only tasted elderberry wine once and it was just diabolical , but everyone keeps telling me it's gorgeous so I'm thinking maybe it was a bad batch I tasted.

I have left lots of trees with flowers on so I may try elderberry wine and cordial in autumn.

Thanks Bernard Smith