You can make sloe gin, one of the best festive drinks, at home with this easy hedgerow recipe.

One of the best discoveries that we made once we’d moved into our new garden was that our hedges were packed with young sloe bushes. And as the year went on, we were even happier to find that these young plants were already producing sloes.

sloe

The chickens were happy about it, too, so we kept them away from the bushes, and after the first frost we picked all the fruits. A frost loosens the skin of a sloe, which makes it easier to use it for gin-making. Sloe gin is one of the greatest things to drink at Christmas, and now we could make our own.

It’s quite simple. Prick all your sloes so that the skin is pierced, place them in a jar two thirds of the way to the top, and then fill the jar to the top with gin. Leave for eight weeks.

Then you’ll end up with something that looks like this:

Pour through a sieve, and serve. Don’t forget that this stuff is strong: it’s just neat gin with sloe flavouring, so you won’t need any more than this much, and maybe even this much is enough to send you a bit tiddly in front of a log fire. So best eat some mince pies as you go.

sloe gin

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