Home-made hooch is not so straightforward

9:41am Monday 21st January 2008

Comments (0)   Have your say »

SOME things in life are a real let down. And this time, I'm not talking about my husband.

Since plundering the hedgerows in late summer, and reaping a very decent harvest of sloe berries, I had been filled with a childlike sense of excitement. I'd washed the berries and put them in the freezer, in readiness to fulfil my plan to make my very own sloe gin.

Making pies from home-grown fruit and vegetables - at which I recently tried my hand - is all very nice, but making your own alcohol would, I thought, be truly amazing. For a start, we'd save a fortune, and, if my brother's wine is anything to go by, home brew is also very drinkable.

So, on Saturday evening, I tapped sloe gin' into Google and printed off a couple of recipes. They were shorter than I imagined, and I soon realised why - the main ingredient was a litre bottle of gin.

I was confused to say the least. Surely, if you're MAKING gin, you shouldn't have to buy it. But you do. Sloe gin, is just gin flavoured with sloes. And you simply supply the flavouring.

To me this was devastating. I had pictured me and my husband, holed-up in the shed at the bottom of the garden, stirring a vast jam pan of purple-coloured liquid, collecting sediment through rusty funnels, siphoning off impurities, and bottling it in giant vats.

I imagined us, like a couple of moonshiners, furtively transferring the liquor to standard-size bottles and selling it from a handcart as we trundled across the country via ancient greenways.

Despite the disappointment, I forged ahead, forking out the best part of £10 for the alcohol.

The process involves pricking each berry several times with a sterilised needle. All I can say is, don't attempt this with even one millilitre of booze in your system. It's fine for the first dozen or so berries - but after that the probability of jabbing your fingers increases by about ten per cent for every three sloes.

My husband helped, and by the time we'd finished, we needed a stiff drink to recover. I went back on the internet, hoping to find a recipe for genuine alcohol - that I could make myself.

I decided on scrumpy as the most exciting option - especially if we really got into the spirit and risked life and limb to steal apples from our neighbour's garden.

But, heck, the process wasn't half complicated. Sulphiting to risk contamination, oxidising, measuring original gravity. Judging from the recipes I read, I think you need a laboratory for this kind of thing not a garden shed.

Wine making seems to be just as difficult, with yeast cultures, nutrients, temperatures, hydrometers and the like.

I think I got off lightly with my sloe gin. I can't wait until summer, when I will proudly serve it to friends, and tell some extremely elaborate lies about how I made it.