Simple sloe gin recipe

Bottles of sloe gin

The first frosts hit this part of the country this week, I’ve been eagerly awaiting them. No, I’m not a great fan of chilly weather, I’ve just had my eye on a few little blackthorn bushes that grow along our lane.

Blackthorn berries (prunus spinosa) – better known as sloes – are the important ingredient in that Christmastime favourite, sloe gin. Back to those frosts… it’s recommended that you pick them after a spell of freezing temperatures, as this swells the berries and makes their skin split. If you don’t want to wait, you’ll need to prick each berry with a pin or skewer before steeping them in the gin. Letting the cold weather do the hard work is my preferred method!

Blackthorn berries aka sloes on a branch | H is for Home

Conveniently, for this post, we had half a bottle of Hortus gin left over from those almost forgotten summer gin & tonics. That’s just the right amount for the number of sloes I was able to forage – about 150 grams.

You add half the weight of sloes in sugar; i.e. 75 grams of sugar to 150 grams of berries. The amount of gin you add is much more flexible. Countryfile Magazine recommends 500 grams of sloes to a 70cl bottle of gin, River Cottage say around 325 grams per bottle and The Guardian 350 grams. The ratio that I used was about 300 grams to a bottle.

Pouring sugar into bottle | H is for Home Pouring gin into bottle | H is for Home

My sloe gin may just about be ready to crack open at Christmas. Next Christmas – or even the Christmas after that – is optimal time for the fruit to infuse with the alcohol.

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Simple sloe gin recipe | H is for Home

Bottles of sloe gin

Simple sloe gin

Course Drinks
Cuisine British

Ingredients
  

  • 150 g sloes
  • 75 g caster sugar
  • 35 cl half a bottle London dry gin

Instructions
 

  • Sterilise a bottle or Kilner/Le Parfait preserving jar
  • Rinse, drain and pat dry the sloes
  • Add the sloes, sugar and gin. Seal the cork/cap/lid and swirl the contents together for 30 seconds or so. Set aside in a cool, dry, dark spot
  • Each day for about a week, swirl the contents together for 10 seconds or so. Once all the sugar has completely dissolved, you can strain to remove the fruit and store the sloe gin (for years... if you can resist the urge to crack it open!)
Simple sloe gin ingredients
Keyword alcohol, forage, gin, sloes

Out & about… Autumn

It’s been a long time since our last Out & about post – we even missed the whole of summer!

Flower-filled fields feel a distant memory…

…the flowers gave way to autumn leaves…

…mushrooms…

…and berries.


For the first couple of weeks of autumn we had the best of both worlds – sunshine as well as amazing seasonal colour.

We were seeing butterflies until quite late in the year…

…but there was no doubting that summer was over, as the winter-visiting geese were beginning to arrive.

Even the autumn sunshine is now a thing of the past – it seems to have been raining non-stop for almost a month. But now we’re into December, this rain will hopefully turn to snow which will mean a magical white Christmas!