Finished your sloe gin? Don’t throw away the fruit.

Ever made sloe gin?  What do you do with the sloes once they have imparted their lovely flavour?

Back before Christmas we found a great new place to forage for these tasty fruit and so made lots and lots of sloe gin ( see recipe here) .  We have now finished off a few bottles and have enjoyed the sloes with vanilla ice cream  on several occasions (do remember to watch out for the stones – they are pretty hard even after several months in alcohol).  So, about time to try something new with them – flavouring wine.

What you need:

Remaining sloes from 1 bottle of sloe gin

1 bottle red wine – suggest a screw top just to make life easy.

and that’s about it.  Easy peasy.

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Start by pouring yourself a glass of wine – large enough to make space in the wine bottle to add the sloes.  You can drink this now  – I always find it helps!

Carefully transfer the sloes from your gin bottle into the wine bottle. I found this easiest to do by pouring them into a bowl and then transferring with clean hands.

Then simply pop the screw top back on and leave the flavours to infuse for a month.

It’s a good idea to stick a label onto the bottle to identify it, and to mark on the date when it will be ready to drink – as once the sloes are in it looks like any other unopened bottle of red wine.

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Has anyone tried anything similar?  Any other ideas for using the sloes?

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6 thoughts on “Finished your sloe gin? Don’t throw away the fruit.”

  1. Hi

    Thanks for this – am keen to try (have just finished ‘brewing’ my first ever batch of sloe gin). Two questions:

    1) Any reason for not simply adding the red win into the kilner jar that the gin has been drained from? Would it make any difference?

    2) Any need to shake or turn the bottle of wine periodically as you would for a sloe-gin infusion?

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    1. I’m sure pouring the wine into the kilner jar would be fine and shaking it occasionally would probably help. We’ve just emptied out some damsons from gin so I’m wondering now if I should try the same with those. Thanks for reading – let me know how it turns out ( hubby drank the wine before I managed to properly sample it 😯)

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  2. Ok, so I had no idea what sloes are but found the answer in your sloe gin recipe. I’ve never heard of the tree or the fruit or the type of gin. I’d be interested in buying one bottle from you next time you make it because it’s something I have never tried and I love trying new things.

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