Brew Day - AG#6 Hoppily Ever After: An Elderflower Wedding Ale

This is a custom brew to experiment with some dried elderflowers.  We had bought a pack of dried elderflowers on eBay and were looking for a recipe to use them in.  The recipe was posted in a thread on Jim's Beer Kit forums.  

The elderflowers cost £3 delivered for 100g from the seller geordie256.

This has been brewed for a family wedding and was originally called Under The Thumb.

One thing we noticed was that some of the elderflower bits got through the hop filter and additional sieve and have ended up in the bottle. At least it shows that it's got elderflowers in it! If we were to brew it again we'd probably use a muslin filter rather than the sieve when transferring from the boiler in to the FV.

Grain & Fermentables

• Pale Malt, 4360g
• Pale Crystal Malt, 250g
• Gypsum, 1tsp
• Epsom Salts, 1/2tsp

Hops & Copper Finings

• First Gold, 13g pre boil
• First Gold, 13g for 90mins
• Protafloc, 1 tablet last 20mins
• First Gold, 7g for last 10mins
• Dried Elderflowers, 40g for last 10mins
• First Gold, 6g for last 5mins

Brew Details

• Brew Day: 20th March 2010
• Transfered to Secondary: Didn't transfer this one, direct from primary to bottling
• Bottled: 5th April 2010 (21 litres)
• Yeast: Safale US-05
• Brew Length: 23 litres
• Mash Time: 90 minutes @ 67°C
• Water-to-Grain Ratio (L:Kg) : 2:1 
• Boil Time: 90 minutes
• OG - Recipe/Achieved: 1.042 / 1.050
• FG - Recipe/Achieved: 1.011 / 1.006
• ABV - Recipe/Achieved: 4.1% / 5.9%
• EBU/EBC: 21/11
• Priming: 80g granulated sugar boiled in 250ml of wort and added to bottling bucket

We use Graham Wheeler's Beer Engine software for capturing the recipe.  Here's the custom recipe file for this brew.

Pictures

The customary shot of the grains and salts awaiting the mash:

The first runnings from the mash tun.  We seemed to miss the pre-boil volume by about a litre, which explains why the OG was higher than we expected, and why the ABV was a lot stronger than planned:

This was another brew where we mashed-out on a Saturday evening, wrapped the wort up overnight and started the boil first thing on the Sunday morning.

The hops and dried elderflowers, ready to go:

The start of the boil with the pre-boil and 90minute hops added:

Finally the post-boil gravity.  Way higher than we expected, but that's down to missing the pre-boil volume from the mash tun.

We didn't take any more pictures for some reason.

Here's the label that we put together for this brew:

More pictures here.

Dave & Suki.