Sloes in the bottle
There are half a dozen blackthorn trees in the horses’ field, absolutely covered with sloe. There is very little you can do with sloes, as they’re so bitter, apart from bottle them with gin and wait for them to ferment.
So over the weekend we headed out with mud-proof shoes and carrier bags, climbed through the electric fence and spent half an hour picking them from the trees. There were so many that in that short time we managed to harvest a kilo and a half, which was enough for two litres of gin, the best part of a litre of vodka (as an experiment) and some left over to freeze.
It’s very simple to make. You just have to be patient. For several months.
If the sloes haven’t already been exposed to frost, which will start to rot the skins, you have to first pierce each one with a skewer or pin. This lets the gin into the fruit, and the juices of the fruit out into the gin. It takes a long time, as there is a small stone in the middle of each one, but you need to do enough to half fill each of your bottles.
Sloes with sugar
Weigh how much you’ve put in each one and add half that weight again of sugar, then top up the bottle with gin. We were using half litre bottles, with half a pound of sloes and quarter of a pound of sugar in each one, which left room for around a third of a litre of gin.
Screw on an airtight lid, give it a good shake to mix it all about and then put it on a shelf for at least two months to brew, shaking it again every week or so. By Christmas we should have a wonderful bright pink liqueur ready for drinking.
Already they are turning a kind of burgundy, but the vodka one, interestingly, went from clear to beetroot red in just four or five hours, suggesting the alcohol in vodka reacts more violently with sloes than gin does.
Pouring gin on the sloes
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We tried sloe vodka as an experiment and found the results were better than the gin. We had to keep tasting it, you know, to make sure there was enough sugar in and hardly any of it survived til Xmas!