Sloes

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Last month on a country walk I saw a tree laden with the plumpest most irridiscent blue sloes I can recall seeing, but I had no need of them.

Then this week a friend told me he'd not seen any sloes this year so I took him to that hedgerow. The easy ones had been picked and the remaining ones had lost a lot of their bloom, some were black, some wrinkled, but there were still too many to pick and we stopped when we'd got 4 pounds.

He was pleased because they are very ripe now, soft, came off the branches easily. He's now filled bottles with 4.5 litres of maturing sloe gin!

[Jenise]

Somewhere in the recesses of my brain is knowledge of the term "slow-gin", usually with the word 'fizz' attached, which I equate with being red (but might not be). But I've never had one nor did I know that there was actually a fruit called a sloe--so this is informative, and the picture appreciated. So you just pour gin over them, hide and wait?

A sloe is a relative of a plum. It is tiny and nasty to eat out of hand. But prick it, place in gin with a little sugar and wait three months....

Hi Jenise

Yup, it's called Sloe Gin because its made with sloes. They are the fruit of a very thorny very bushy small tree that grows abundantly in hedgerows, probably because they were ideal for making animal-proof hedges in the old days.

As Jeff says, you prick the sloes to burst the skin, place in a container, add sugar and cover with gin. Shake it every day for a week and leave for three months.

It makes a deep red liqueur type drink.

I found this article on how to make sloe gin on the Guardian website

[Jenise]

So very similar to other 'attic liqueurs' involving clear hooch and fruit just gin and that unusual fruit in this case.

I'm pretty sure that the sloe gin that goes into most sloe gin fizzes has never seen a sloe. Its a nasty, overly sweet liqueur that's mostly consumed by teenagers. I remember it from my own teenage years, actually, although I preferred cherry brandy when it came to nasty overly sweet liqueurs. I seem to remember that someone's either producing or importing good sloe gin, but I've not tried it if that's the case, and I would be surprised of there's anything out there significantly better than a good homemade version.