From Our Farm to Your Bottle: How We Make Our American Elderberry Syrup
There are easier ways to make elderberry syrup than the way we make it.
I know this because we've done some of them.
When we first started making elderberry syrup, we weren't elderberry farmers. We bought dehydrated European elderberries, rehydrated them, and made syrup like a lot of other small producers do.
Today, we're growing American elderberries here in northern Minnesota, working directly with other American growers, harvesting and processing the fruit ourselves, pressing our own juice and making our syrup in our own commercial kitchen.
And I can tell you that doing it this way involves a lot more buckets, freezers, equipment, hand labor and purple-stained everything.
But it also means we know a whole lot more about what goes into every bottle.
So let me show you what that actually looks like.
It Starts With a Very Short Minnesota Harvest
Our elderberry harvest usually begins around the middle to third week of August. How long it lasts depends on what northern Minnesota decides to throw at us that year. Our average first frost is around September 10. Some years we get an extra week or two. Other years, the cold shuts us down early.
We don't harvest according to a date on the calendar, though. We harvest when the berries are ready. One way to tell is simply by looking at them. The berries become a very dark purple, almost black, when they're fully ripe.
We also use a Brix meter.
A Brix meter gives us a measurement related to the soluble solids in the fruit, including its sugars. The number varies between elderberry varieties and growing locations, so it's something that becomes more useful after you've collected measurements over multiple seasons and learned what's normal for a particular variety in your field.
For our berries, we're generally looking somewhere in the range of 8–14 Brix.
And then we pick.
By hand.
Every single cluster.
Yes, Elderberries Are Still Harvested by Hand
This surprises a lot of people, but there isn't currently a reliable commercial mechanical elderberry harvester that has solved the problem well enough to replace hand harvesting.
Researchers have worked on it. Growers would certainly love one.
We're still waiting.
Part of the problem is the plant itself. A commercial elderberry needs clusters that ripen relatively evenly, because you want to harvest the whole cluster at once. Even then, separating ripe fruit from the plant mechanically without destroying it is difficult.
So for now, we take crews into the field with buckets, cut the ripe clusters by hand and collect them in totes.
We harvest our own farm, and we also work with other American elderberry growers. We've gone out with crews to harvest other farms ourselves, and when we buy berries, I want to know the growers. I want to be able to walk their fields, see how they grow and know where our fruit came from.
Once those berries are picked, the clock starts.
From the Field to the Freezer
Fresh elderberries are extremely perishable.
This isn't a crop you harvest and leave sitting around for a few days until you get to it. As soon as we bring the clusters in, they go through our destemming machine.
Calling it an “elderberry destemmer” makes it sound like somebody somewhere is manufacturing fancy elderberry equipment.
They're not.
One of the funny things about the elderberry industry is how much of our equipment has been borrowed or adapted from other industries.
Our destemmer uses augers to move the berry clusters over a screen. The holes are large enough for the berries to fall through while the stems continue through the machine.
From there, the berries go through our three-compartment sink:
Wash. Sanitize. Rinse.
Then they're drained, put into buckets and moved immediately into our deep freezer at around -20°F.
Our four-gallon buckets hold about 25 pounds of elderberries each.
That's where they'll stay until we're ready to press them.
Then I Beat Up the Elderberries
When we're ready to make juice, we thaw the frozen berries.
Freezing helps break down the cell walls, but we've found that if we put whole thawed berries directly into our bladder press, plenty of berries can make it through without completely bursting. That means juice stays trapped inside.
I don't like leaving juice behind. So before pressing, I crush them.
We put the thawed berries into our kettle and use a large stainless-steel food-processing mixer attached to a drill. It looks a little like an industrial paint mixer, except this one is made for food.
And I beat the berries up.
It's not particularly elegant, but it works.
Breaking the berries apart before pressing means we're able to extract more of the juice instead of finding whole berries left in the press afterward.
It can also produce something elderberry growers affectionately call “green goo.”
Yes, that's the technical term we actually use.
It's a sticky, rubbery substance that can come out of the elderberry skins during processing and is notoriously annoying to clean. Water and regular soap don't do much to it.
Some processors try to avoid creating it.
I've decided I'd rather deal with cleaning the equipment and get more of the juice out of our berries.
Pressing Fresh American Elderberry Juice
From there, the crushed fruit goes into our vertical bladder press.
Again: elderberry equipment by way of another industry...
Ours is essentially adapted from equipment used for pressing wine grapes.
Our press holds roughly 500–550 pounds of elderberries at a time.
Depending on the berries, it takes approximately 10.5–12 pounds of whole elderberries to produce one gallon of juice.
Once we've pressed the berries, the juice goes back into buckets and back into the freezer until we're ready to make syrup.
That does a couple things for us.
First, juice takes up considerably less freezer space than hundreds of pounds of whole berries.
It also allows us to keep our inventory moving. Our goal is to use our berry supply within a year rather than holding onto old fruit season after season.
When it's time to make syrup, we pull out the juice we need, thaw it and head into the kitchen.
Some of Those Berries Take a Different Path: The Freeze Dryer
Not every elderberry we process ends up as juice for elderberry syrups.
We also freeze-dry whole American elderberries for our teas, snacks and other products, and for people who want whole elderberries to use at home.
This is especially important to us because of how Popple Tree Creek Farms started.
Before we were growing American elderberries, we were buying dehydrated European elderberries and rehydrating them to make syrup.
Today, if you want to make your own elderberry syrup, you can start with the same kind of American-grown fruit we're working with here instead.
We freeze-dry whole berries rather than using the traditional heat-dehydration process you'll commonly find with imported dried elderberries.
The difference becomes pretty obvious when you add water.
Freeze-drying removes moisture at low temperatures and leaves the berry with a porous, almost sponge-like structure. Add water back and it rehydrates quickly.
That makes a big difference when you're standing over your own pot of elderberry syrup.
Instead of needing a long simmer to soften and rehydrate a hard, heat-dried berry, freeze-dried berries absorb water quickly and begin releasing their deep purple color and berry flavor. We've also found that the flavor stays much brighter and more berry-forward rather than taking on the cooked, raisin-like flavor you can sometimes get with heat-dried fruit.
They're also incredibly versatile.
We use freeze-dried elderberries in products like our tea blends and freeze-dried snacks. At home, people use them for everything from syrup and tea to smoothies, oatmeal, granola and baking.
But I especially like them for the person who wants to make elderberry syrup at home. You still get to make your own recipe, choose your own ingredients and make it exactly the way you want it. You just get to start with an American elderberry whose path from the field to the package is a whole lot shorter.
Our Elderberry Syrup Is About Two-Thirds Juice
Our recipe is pretty simple.
It's approximately:
65% American elderberry juice
35% honey
A small amount of citric acid for pH adjustment
That's it.
The honey comes from a local apiary about six miles from our farm.
The citric acid has an important job. Elderberries are naturally a low-acid food, so we adjust the pH below 4.6 to produce a shelf-stable product. Once you open the bottle, it goes in the refrigerator.
One ingredient you won't find in that list?
Water.
A lot of elderberry syrups contain it. And from a manufacturing perspective, I understand why. Elderberry juice is expensive. Honey is expensive.
Water is not.
Our philosophy has always been pretty simple:
Why would you buy our water? You have your own water.
So we don't use it to stretch the bottle.
Each tablespoon of our syrup contains the juice from 9.5 grams of American elderberries. That's actual berry-equivalent based on the fruit that went into the juice, not the weight of a powder or concentrate.
See what to look for when comparing the amount of elderberry in different products → Choosing Elderberry Products
Why We Started Doing It This Way
We didn't start out with this process.
In the very beginning, I made elderberry syrup from berries growing in our own yard. When those ran out, we started buying dehydrated European elderberries because they were inexpensive, readily available and easy to store.
As the business grew, I started paying a lot more attention to what was coming in those bags.
We saw enough quality inconsistencies that I became uncomfortable building our product around an ingredient whose path I couldn't really see.
Eventually we decided we wanted to use American-grown elderberries instead.
At first, the plan was to grow enough ourselves to supply the business.
That was optimistic.
We've grown to the point where our farm alone isn't going to produce all the elderberries we need, and that's okay.
We grow our own Sambucus canadensis here in northern Minnesota, and we work with other nearby American growers to supply the rest. The difference is that these are growers I know. I visit their farms. I see their fields. I understand how their fruit was grown and handled. In fact, we harvest them ourselves.
For me, that's a much better way to buy an ingredient.
There's a Lot of Work Inside One Bottle
People sometimes visit the farm or see our equipment and tell us afterward that they had no idea how much went into making elderberry syrup.
I get it.
If you're holding a 12-ounce bottle, you don't see the harvest crew.
You don't see somebody carrying buckets through the field.
You don't see the destemmer, three-compartment sink, deep freezer, mixer, bladder press, commercial kitchen or 60-gallon kettle.
You definitely don't see me cleaning green goo off equipment.
You just see the bottle.
But that's one of the reasons I wanted to show you the process.
We're not buying a finished concentrate and adding ingredients to it.
We're working with the actual fruit.
And when you understand everything that happens between an elderberry plant and a bottle of syrup, “farm to bottle” starts to mean something a little more literal.
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