Hey everyone,
I have a couple of one-gallon jugs of apple juice fermenting in the closet and two elderberry bushes with lots of green berries on them. The berries will be black and ready to harvest just about the time the cider will be ready for the bottle. I plan to use elderberries for some jams later in the season but in the meantime I want to experiment with flavoring the cider. I've seen several things online from the simple to the ridiculously complicated and here's what I've come up with:
Option 1: Use the berries in the next batch of cider- smash them and put them in with the yeast and let the stuff brew together
Option 2: Squeeze the juice from the berries and cook a simple syrup with the berry juice and use a small amount of this in each bottle to carbonate/add flavor to my current batch.
I guess either way could work. My concern with option 1 is that elderberries need to be cooked a bit or else they can cause stomachache. Don't know if fermenting them would take care of that issue.
