Two recipes: Wild Damson Gin and Sloe Gin recipes
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Liqueurs | 713 comments
Wild damsons are a beautiful rich dark colour
Unlike sloes, wild damsons are hard to find. For every thirty wild plum trees there may be just one wild damson tree. When I spot wild damsons in the hedgerows, they are harvested into a special bag.
These, and the diminutive bullace, are the kings of hedgerow fruit. These tiny fruit make such an irresistible liqueur that overnight guests have actually turned down Danny’s famous cooked breakfast, and gone back to bed to sleep off the excesses of the night before.
Our damson and sloe gin is not the thick ultra sweet variety. We prefer the sugar to enhance rather than shield the flavour. Every three months or so it’s sampled and, if necessary, topped up with sugar. Usually no extra sugar is needed.
We try to keep our damson and sloe gin well away from the drinks tray! Each year we make a lot of fruit gin and vodka (more recipes to follow, in time). Sloe gin is the big craze at the moment around here, as sloes are more plentiful.
Here are our recipes for both. We are also starting experimenting with sloe gin see this post for details
Tips and tricks:
- Make more than you need the first year, so you can compare different vintages. This liqueur does improve over time.
- Some people drain the grog through muslin after a couple of months, to clarify the liqueur and bottle. We don’t bother as one old soak tipped that, once the gin is drunk, you can pour medium sherry on the fruit and start all over again! The latter is devilish and drinkable within three months. We have a recipe for this in our wine and gin section.
- Keep your fruit gin away from the light as this will maintain the colour. Unless it is in a dark green or brown bottle. Wrapping it in brown parcel paper will keep out the light.
- Make notes on a label of your fruit gin/vodka /sugar ratio and stick it onto the bottle(s) so that you have a record, if you make a particularly good batch. We note our responses as the grog matures. Yucky after sixth months can be to die for in a year (you will probably not remember without notes). Notes seem boring when you are making the grog but they are so worthwhile when you start again the next year. It won’t be long before you will get a feel of what works well for your taste (and the notes will come into their own).
- Adding almond essence to sloe gin lifts it from good to great. I haven’t tried this with the damson gin but return in a years’ time for our review.
- Don’t kill the liqueur with too much sugar at the start. Use the amount above to start your sloe or damson gin and then every couple of months take a tiny sip. At this time add more sugar if it is too sharp for your taste.
- Gin v Vodka? Vodka can be used as the spirit for these recipes. Although I’m a vodka drinker, we tend to stick to a gin base for our fruit liqueurs.
- A good damson gin can be made from ordinary damsons available in the shops. As they are bigger you would need to put them into a larger Le Parfait jar (I’d use a 2 litre size).
- People have been picking sloes from September 1st around here. Some people say that you shouldn’t pick sloes until after the first frost. This can be circumvented by putting your sloes in the freezer overnight. We don’t bother with either method and always have great results.
- This year we have made up a number of small (1lb honey jars) of sloe gin to give as Christmas presents.
| Wild Damson Gin and sloe gin Recipes |
Recipe Type: Liqueurs
Prep time: 15 mins
Total time: 15 mins
Ingredients
- Wild damson gin:
- 1lb/454gm of washed wild damsons
- 6 ozs/168gm of white granulated sugar
- 75cl bottle of medium quality gin
- Sterilised 1 litre (at least) Le Parfait jar or wide necked bottle with stopper/cork
- Sloe Gin:
- 1lb/454gm of washed sloes
- 4 ozs/112gm of white granulated sugar
- 75cl bottle of medium quality gin
- Sterilised 1 litre (at least) Le Parfait jar or wide necked bottle
- 1-2 drops of almond essence
Instructions
- Wild damson gin:
- Wash damsons well and discard any bad or bruised fruit. Prick fruit several times with a fork and place damsons in either a large
- Kilner/Le Parfait jar or a wide necked 1 litre bottle.
- Using a funnel, add the sugar and top up with gin to the rim.
- Shake every day until the sugar is dissolved and then store in a cool, dark place until you can resist it no longer (leave for at least three months, we usually let it mature for a year). If you are planning to drink this after 3 months, have a nip afetr a month, and top up with sugar to taste.
- Some people strain the grog (through muslin/jelly bag) after 3 months and bottle it, leaving it mature for six months. We strain and bottle after a year. Don’t leave the straining process any longer than a year; leaving the fruit in too long can spoil the liqueur, as we found to our cost one year.
- Sloe gin:
- Wash sloes well and discard any bruised or rotten fruit. Prick fruit several times with a fork and place sloes in either a large Kilner/Le Parfait jar or a wide necked 1 litre bottle. I put several sloes in my palm to prick them rather than picking them up one by one.
- Using a funnel, add the sugar and top up with gin to the rim. Always open sugar bags over the sink as sugar tends to get caught in the folds at the top of the bag.
- Add the almond essence.
- Shake every day until the sugar is dissolved and then store in a cool, dark place until you can resist it no longer (leave for at least three months, we usually let it mature for a year).
- Some people strain the grog (through muslin/jelly bag) after 3 months and bottle it, leaving it mature for six months. We strain and bottle after a year.
Leave a reply
Choice of bottles is an interesting issue to the home brewer. Soundest advice is use the same type of bottles that are in use commercially for any given type of “brew”. After all that is proven to be the best. If you want champagne bottles, try asking the local hotel that does weddings and functions. They are often glad to save on dispossal costs if you can be relied on to collect promptly. Plastic champagne corks and the wires to hold them down are readily avialiable from home brew shops – take a look on the net under “home brew mail order”.
I make elderflower champagne using a little less sugar than the recipe. When it has finished and the sediment settled out, I bottle it and add no more than ½ teaspoon of sugar per bottle and cork. The secondary fermentation will then kick in to give a sparkling result – as opposed to pseudo fire extinguisher!
I make sloe gin and have a good supply of sles and blackberries. Last week I was given a litre of spanish brandy. Is sloe brandy or blackberry brandy any good? If so, please does anyone have a recipe?
Regards, Paul S
Ha! That sounds like my mind set Karen….more has got to be better, right?!!! Thanks for info, I will check out Mr FW’s site.
Hi Amanda I’m dreadful with recipes but I’m pretty sure I used HFW recipe. If you google ‘elderflower champagne river cottage’ it comes up (I don’t want to infringe copyright). There is a note on the site about various results, amending the amount of sugar and swing top bottles which sounds like it may be to do with the explosions. I must admit I almost certainly put in more flowers than they say and left it in the bucket for a couple of weeks cos I was busy. I think you’re also supposed to drink it within days and I left it in the bottle for a couple of weeks so no wonder my bottles exploded! Next year I shall try to cut back the time in the bucket and drink soon after bottling!
Hmmmmm, thank you all for the information. Tis indeed one I need to mull over. Having never made pear perry before I have no idea how fizzy it is or should be so maybe I will wait and see how it turns out before I consider what to bottle it in.
Think I will give the grolsch bottles a miss though Karen! However your elderflower champagne sounds delicious…..would you mind giving me the recipe please?! I made elderflower cordial for the first time this year. Think the champagne may top that though.
Thinking about it, the difference may be about whether the secondary fermentation is in the bottle (where the pressure is created), aka champagne, or whether the product is just put in the bottle in the state that you buy it.
Have to say that I am thinking your elderflower champagne maybe shouldn’t have been quite as active as that, though, Karen. That sounded ferocious! And the danger, of course, is that the risk of an explosion is greatest when disturbed, as in being handled. Maybe one should stick to the purpose made champagne bottles (or equivalent) if whatever is to be fermented in the bottle.
Sorry to put the cat among the pigeons but I made elderflower champagne this year and bought 14 bottles of grolsch at about £1.49 each. This wasn’t nuch dearer than buying the flip top bottles but had the beer thrown in for free. Well they looked stronger than the flip tops you buy specially and they had held grolsch, but when I went out into the garage which is carpeted (sad I know but so much more homely) there was a strong smell of ‘pub’. One of my grolsch bottled filled with elderflower champagne had exploded! We released the others to take off the pressure and lost 1/2 the contents of each bottle. Admittedly it had a real kick and a few hours later when we re-released the tops they blew hard again but I would suggest keeping an eye on them. Boy we all got merry on very little mind! Sorry this puts you back in the plastic/glass quandary again doesn’t it? Perhaps perry is less potent than elderflower champagne?!?
Adam
“one of these chemicals that many suspect of causing you to grow a second head but industry denies flat out”
Ain’t that the truth? Strange how it’s perfectly safe, but is no longer used for baby milk, etc!
My personal bete noir is aspartame (Nutrasweet) which was blocked by the American FDA for years, until Donald Rumsfeld (remember him?) got involved and miraculously it was deemed safe! Now it’s really hard to avoid and appears in most soft drinks and many ‘healthy’ yoghurts…
Can’t advise on corking champagne bottles, as never done it. But if appearance isn’t important to you, and as you are new to doing it and probably going to be doing some experimenting, it may be worth considering screw caps on bottles that have have previously had sparkling content. But good luck whatever, Amanda.
And thank you Adam, above, for the link. That was a well found article about the Bisphenol. I had no idea that it is in the lacquer used in cans too. You can’t turn around these days without something being a scare. But it is a real scare, this one.
Hi Joanne,
Thanks for clearing that up for me. I do have a friend who loves a drop of cava (and if its on offer, Champagne!) so I will ask for her empties. I have aquired a corking machine but do I need special corks? Cava/Champagne always have the mushroom shaped corks as opposed to the cylindrical wine type. I am a total beginner at this so everyone’s good advice has been gratefully received, thank you all.
Hi Amanda. Your friend is quite right in that ordinary glass wine bottles might explode under pressure. They’re probably still fine for slightly sparking or petillant, but you would need to be pretty experienced to be very sure what you are going to get. The proper sparkling wines aren’t put in the diffent shape bottle just for the sake of appearance. They are made from much tougher glass. And plastic isn’t so silly in that context. But cider bottles will obviously be appropriate glass too.
An option is to collect them from friends or to go to recycle centres for them. But if you want to use plastic, which you are still going to have to go to trouble to acquire, just make sure you check from the recycle symbol whether they are appropriate.
Some of the confusion around this is that the various recipes that advocate the use of plastic bottles, or that just assume they are fine, are very likely older or are just coming from understanding that predates the greater consciousness of the dangers. But plastic is still terribly useful. You have just got to appreciate that “plastic” is a generic term and that you have to be aware of what type of plastic you are using.