The simple pleasures of sloe gin

The gin craze of recent years has reached a scale that would have horrified Hogarth. You can now buy strawberry, raspberry, rhubarb, blueberry and lime gins in supermarkets.

For me, though, there is only one flavoured variety worth bothering with: sloe gin. Where the rest are novelties, this is a staple dating back to the early 19th century.

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Druin Burch

Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

Sloe gin is everywhere — Buckingham Palace even launched a line this year. But it is the easiest thing to make at home and there’s something very pleasurable about the ritual of doing so.

Folk wisdom suggests you should go foraging for sloes in the days after the first frosts — by which point they won’t ripen further but haven’t yet dried up — which means from mid-late October through November.