Sloe Gin

Definitely not a really cheap gin. This recipe might be simple, but there’ll be a lot of waiting and the last thing you want is to end up with an inferior tasting sloe gin.

So, go for a decent quality gin – you don’t have to break the bank. Just something with enough quality to build on.

Sloe – pronounced “slow” – is a small blue/black fruit that grows on blackthorn bushes. The word sloe comes from a mixture of old European words for plum.

Sloes are a typical foraging ingredient! These little berries aren’t common supermarket ingredients. While you can buy sloes in some supermarkets or online, your best bet is to get out there and pick sloes yourself!

Sloes grow in Blackthorn bushes, which you’ll find all over the countryside up and down the UK. Not only that, but you can also find sloes growing in urban areas too, including the likes of city parks. 

Sloes are easy to notice – look for small dark purple berries growing on a thorny bush. The perfect sloe gin is made with foraged sloes, as finding your own ingredients just adds so much to the satisfaction.

Sloes typically grow between August and November. The later in the season the better – any time from early autumn through to the winter. The amount of sloes that grow all depends on the rainfall during the summer – the more rain and sun, the greater the number of sloes. On the other hand, if the weather has been too dry, sloes will be shrivelled and way too dry to use.

The best way to pick sloe berries is to wait until they are fully ripe. They should be soft enough to swish between your fingers and should have taken on a dark purple colour.

You’ll also notice a lot of ripe berries on a hawthorn bush will have already dropped to the ground.

Traditionally, when picking sloe berries for making sloe gin, ginthusiasts would wait for the first frost of the winter. This is because the berries would end up with split skin. This enables the juice of the berry to infuse into the gin in a more effective way.

An easier way is to place the sloe berries in the freezer overnight – you’ll achieve the same results.

Incredible! It’s got a plumlike, earthy quality to it. Sweet, but in a way that’s hard to achieve normally. That’s why a homemade sloe gin recipe is so sensational. Trust me, it’s well worth the wait!

Any clean bottle (glass bottle) with a cap will do the job. In this case you can even use two 1L gin bottles and split the ingredients between the two!

It’s best to steep the sloe berries in the gin for at least 3 months. To err on the safe side, don’t soak it for longer than a year because the fruit may go off and destroy the drink.

After the sloe gin has been strained, it should keep indefinitely because of the high alcohol content.

For me, a muslin is the best way to strain your sloe gin. 

People do use coffee filters to strain sloe gin. You could try, although muslins aren’t hard to get hold of and work perfectly.

Reserve the fruit for other applications such as in sauces, jellies or desserts. You can use them again and make sloe sherry!

Yes! If you want to make a larger batch, simply double or triple the measurements of this homemade sloe gin recipe.

Sloes are native to Europe and have long been used by the British to create 'shooting Gins' (as they used to be known)

You’d be forgiven for thinking that ‘shooting Gins’ are for doing shots in bars, but actually, they were favoured by the British aristocracy for sipping from a hip flask in the countryside when shooting birds and game.

For a long time, though, Sloe Gin didn’t have the best reputation. At the height of the 18th century was the ‘Gin Craze’; a time where consumption of Gin grew rapidly in Britain, and particularly in London, when it’s said that the average Brit was drinking 14 gallons of the stuff each year.

The quality of the Gin was poor - made with turpentine and all sorts - so adding sloes to it masked the flavour, but was dubbed ‘the poor man’s Port’.

Fast forward to today, and Sloe Gin is having a revival. No longer considered only something your granny liked, the big Gin producers have put lots of care and attention into creating Sloe Gins that are deliciously sweet, tart and balanced.

The history of sloe gin in the UK is, in many ways, linked with the history of land enclosure. Beginning as early as the 17th century, Parliament passed a series of Enclosure Acts that transformed common land into individual farmsteads and properties. In order to break up the land, hedgerows were needed…and, thanks to its dense, spiny branches, the blackthorn was used throughout Britain as a kind of natural fencing. (Today’s foragers know that hedgerows are still some of the very best places to go sloe-harvesting.)

A side effect of all those hedgerows was new, bumper crops of sloe berries. Though sloes on their own are notoriously tart and astringent, it certainly seemed a waste to ignore the annual harvest…and those living in the country soon learned that the best way to take advantage of the berries was to steep them in alcohol.