Making Sloe Gin

This is a rather belated post on how I made my sloe gin with the sloes I collected a couple of months ago.

As I wasn't quite ready to start right after picking the sloes, I split my harvest up into bags of 500g (just over a lb) and put them in the freezer. I also figured freezing them would mimic to some extent the effect of a frost on the sloes; and that is to soften the skins of the fruit which will result in more flavour exuding from them. It also saves pricking each one with a pin!. I also thought it might be a good idea to find out where Gordon's Gin was cheapest. I'd heard from two different sources that yes it does make a difference if you use cheap gin, and no it doesn't! So I thought it best to try and have the best of both worlds and buy a good gin when it was on offer.

A quick google found that in one particular week it was on offer at Asda so a trip to a nearby town was needed, luckily by my friend Judi as she works there several days a week.

A few days later and I was good to go. I think I roughly followed the recipe in my go-to preserving book, The Preserving Book, but I can't remember; which is really useful! Well the book is. I'm not!

I took out one bag of 500g of sloes from the freezer and split them evenly between two 1ltr Kilner jars. This is where it goes a bit pear-shaped...I might have added about 100g of caster sugar to each jar and then I definitely added 1 litre of gin between the two jars i.e. about 500ml per jar.

And then you wait, well kind of. For the first week you need to give the jars a shake each day to help the sugar dissolve. Within a week all of the sugar has been absorbed.

Day 1

Day 3

Day 6

And then you wait, again. After six weeks or so you *need* to have a little taste of the contents to see if you need to add any more sugar; the resulting sloe gin should taste like a sweet liqueur so after tasting I added a couple of heaped tablespoons of sugar and did the shake thing for a few days afterwards until it had dissolved.

I'll take another taste in a few weeks time and it should then hopefully be ready at Christmas!

Joanna

The sloe way to go.....

When you have an allotment you very quickly learn that you need to find ways of preserving your harvests. It is very much a case of feast or famine at times; not famine in the case of not having anything to eat from your plot. This doesn't happen too often apart from maybe when you reach the hunger gap in the spring; that time when your over-wintered crops have run out and the spring sowings aren't quite ready yet. But rather more a case of feast or glut I guess! Try as hard as you might, sometimes you can just get overwhelmed with the harvest of whichever veg is in season, whether it's the dreaded courgette glut or runner beans or what have you.

So preserving is an allotmenteer's best friend.

But we can't grow everything we want on our plots and for that we can raid nature's larder, for come September the hedgerows are teeming with berries and the like.

And so it was yesterday, my friend Judi and I headed off to a secret location to harvest fruit from the hedgerow; namely some sloes.

    

Sloes are the fruit of the blackthorn which is one of the earliest shrubs to flower in spring. Masses of white blossom line the hedges and roadways. Looking back I remember the blossom being plentiful this spring so we were hopeful of there being loads of berries.

We weren't disappointed.

The berries have this purple/blue blush on them and darken to a deep purple/black. Ideally it is best to wait until the first frost of the year before harvesting the berries but with our winters getting milder, the first frost can be quite some way off yet in the autumn.

I restricted myself to half  a trug-full. Being a pro at sloe-picking, Judi had a bucket and picked 4kg!

Our next stop is the nearest Asda to buy some Gordon's Gin. They currently have the best price on 1lt bottles.

Sloe gin here we come!