We had a spare pineapple – had to use it in a photo
We’ve finally cracked open the sloe gin. It’s been slowly fermenting for the last four months, since we headed out into the meadow to pick sloe berries from the blackthorn trees. Each one is a small olive-like fruit with a dusty purple-black skin. Inside they are a delicate pink, and each one has a tiny stone in the middle.
To make sloe gin you need to gather enough to fill half of whichever bottle you want to make it in, and add the same weight of sugar. Pierce each of your sloe berries with a pin, going straight through the middle if you can manage to miss the stone, or coming in from each side if you can’t. This breaks open the skin and lets the gin and the berry juices mix.
You should pick your sloes in the autumn, so there will be none in the hedgerows now, but if you can wait until after the first frosts then the skins will already have been broken, and so piercing may not be necessary.
When you’ve got all that in the bottle you pour in your gin, stopper it up and leave it to brew for at least three months. Give it a shake once a week or so to mix in all the sugar and don’t open it until it’s all fully dissolved into the liquid. We finally opened ours this weekend, and drank the first two glasses as undiluted shots.
It is very, very sweet, and has a syrupy quality not present in regular gin. The colour is a fantastic deep red, and any sloes that come out with the liquid – which can be eaten if you want, although we chose not to – float on the top like cocktail olives.
A bonus of the fermenting process is that you can use a cheaper gin than you might otherwise like to drink. We used a supermarket’s own-brand spirit, and you’d never taste the difference between this and a more expensive label when infused with the sloes.
Fortunately, as we discovered quite by chance when the cat misjudged one of his seat-to-sofa leaps, spilt sloe gin washes out of the carpet quite easily with a mild detergent, leaving only a gentle pink blush to remind you of the fun you had in making and drinking it.
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