Elderberry Mead

A couple of years ago (five years? ten? time flies!), when Sam Rushforth and I were riding the Great Western Trail every day and writing about the rides for Catalyst Magazine, we watched a bush of elderberrys grow ripe next to the trail just inside Provo Canyon. The day we were planning to pick them they disappeared -- food for a ground squirrel that had been watching them even more carefully than we.

We were interested because the year before we had brought a load of them down to the city in our shirtfronts and with the LDS food-storage honey Sam and Nancy had been hording for decades, brewed a savory mead, the bitter elderberries a perfect match for the sweet honey.

This morning, Blue and I came down off the mountain where we had been hiking and ran across more elderberries, and I brought them home to eat with yogurt and with fond memories.