Blackberry Gin

You may recall back in December, my mentioning that a friend and I were experimenting with flavoured gins, having found a glut of sloe berries while out on a walk. The fruits of our labours were a bottle of sloe gin, and a bottle of blackberry gin, as we ran out of sloes before we ran out of gin to flavour. I was charged with the care of the blackberry gin, and when I brought it home it looked like this:

After several weeks of shaking and peering through the glass to see what colour it was now, we decided it was time to test the gins. Both had developed a really lovely dark red colour. So last Friday evening we got together, strained the sloe gin and had a taste of them both.

Sloe gin straining is a messy business. We had
very purple hands by the time we were done!

Blackberry gin

The blackberry gin we didn't strain, we just poured straight from the bottle and considered it a bonus if you got a berry in your glass along with your gin. I tell you what, those berries were lethal!

The sloe gin was lovely; we drank it with tonic water and it went down very easily. But the blackberry was the hands down winner of the evening. It is gorgeous! Tastes so delicious and you don't really notice that you're drinking gin neat, so it's pretty dangerous. Before we knew it, we'd drunk most of the bottle and were more than a little tipsy.

I'm quite looking forward to finishing the gin off and rescuing all those berries. I plan to make some sort of dessert out of them, maybe put them in an apple crumble or something. And we'll definitely be making blackberry gin again!