Sloe gin experiment – part 1

Never one to shy away from experiments in the kitchen, I thought it was about time I had a go at making sloe gin. This year has been amazing for sloes – the blackthorn bushes are overloaded with ripe, juicy sloes – not the hard little black ball-bearings I’m used to seeing.

What encouraged me to give it a go was the taste of a ripe sloe from a blackthorn bush growing in the marshes between Dunwich and Walberswick. It tasted just like a tiny, ripe plum. My second taste of a less ripe berry reminded me that you have to be fully on guard when eating raw sloes, as my mouth puckered and every miligram of water seemed to be sucked out of my mouth in an instant. The ripe ones are sublime, anything other than ripe – beware.

My brother found me a really simple recipe from the BBC recipe website, and armed with a torch (it was 4pm, and already getting dark) and several sandwich boxes, I headed off back to the marshes to gather a pound of sloes. In this part of Suffolk, the air is so clean and pure that lichens grow in profusion on the blackthorn bushes.

Can anyone tell me what species of lichen this is?

Lichen attached to blackthorn bushes on the marshes near Dunwich

 As it was getting darker, we could hear the loud grunts and calls of male deer (it’s rutting season) and sounds of splashing hooves through the reeds – a wonderful sound. It didn’t take long to fill two boxes full of fantastic, bright berries.

I used 1 pound of sloes, of which I pricked the skin of a few to ensure the gin could penetrate the skins, 8oz unrefined granulated sugar (the recipe did say to use caster sugar, but I wanted to use an unrefined sugar) and my own particular blend of gins. The recipe calls for 1 litre of gin, so I used 70cl of Plymouth gin, and 30cl of Bombay Sapphire – I like the combination of the botanicals from the Bombay Sapphire, with the purity of Plymouth.

So, all I need to do now is shake the jar occasionally, and it should be ready to try after Christmas… watch this space.