Elderberry and runner bean wine

This seems at first to be a bizarre combination - elderberry and runner bean wine. We saw the recipe in our ancient Boots the Chemist wine making book and thought we'd give it a go. Our freezer is full of runner beans and we still have lots of them on the allotment which will be a bit too stringy by now to eat ourselves (though the goats like them). So an experiment in bizarre wine making was not going to eat into our food supply.

The recipe is the same as the one we used to make the elderberry wine last week except, for obvious reasons, the addition of a half kilo of chopped runner beans to every kilo of elderberries. They should be boiled and simmered in the preserving pan with the elderberries and then strained before the juice is added to sugar and yeast. Apparently, the runner beans give the elderberry wine more body and makes it smoother. I'll tell you what I think of it in a few months' time when it's been bottled and we start drinking it.

Meanwhile, the hens got the elderberry and runner bean pulp. Waste nothing!