Homemade Fruity Booze!

[NortieTortie]

I'm a beginner and I have a lot of questions. If anyone has the time to help me out with a few of them, I'd really appreciate it.

How long does it take? I've seen a few different recipes, some say to leave for 3 days, others for 2 months - is this just dependent on the fruit and alcohol used? Any tried and tested recipes you'd recommend?

I live in a very urban area, no wild fruit trees local etc so I'd be using supermarket fruit. Would frozen work to save on costs? If so, would I need to defrost them first?

Do you use Kilner jars to make and then decant into bottles? Do you have to sterilise them first in the oven (and if so, how do you do that?), or is a scrub with Fairy good enough?

Sorry for all the questions. I was hoping to do homemade hampers this year but I have no idea what I'm doing.

We just buy fruit from the greengrocer. I can't see why frozen fruit wouldn't work but you'd need to defrost it and drain any liquid off as it would dilute it.

We usually use the bottle that the vodka comes in and pour about a third into an empty or partially empty. We then put the fruit in, we don't put sugar in ours as I'm diabetic.

We usually leave them for 4 weeks initially and taste to see if they're done.

We have gooseberry gin and greengage gin steeping in the cupboard, recipes for fruit gin are online.

I do quince brandy and Sloe gin in Kilner jars. Goes in around late September time, with a spoon of sugar and a vanilla pod and leave until I want to use it. The leftover quince makes a wonderful crumble.

You can get sloe berries from ebay. 3 Months to steep in bottle with gin and sugar (use brown sugar). Are you near any parks at all?

A nice easy one for christmas is to take all the dried fruit ingredients for a christmas cake, put them in a large kilner jar and add a bottle of brandy. The longer you leave it, the better it will be. Sieve/strain the fruit out of the booze, sweeten the booze to taste, and you'll have a christmassy liqueur to drink alongside a slice of cake.

If you start thus early enough in the year, you can then use the boozed fruit to make the cake. But as this is already october, I recommend using the fruit to make a christmassy rocky road.

The longer you leave it the smoother and nicer the flavour will be. Many recipes say about 3 months but personally I leave all of my concoctions for at least a year. If it hasn't mellowed enough, I just leave it longer and the taste gets better. I've got a lemon and ginger vodka that had an hoochy tang with that afterburn taste after 12 months but I just left it for another 2 years and its mellowing out nicely. Apples in any booze seems to mellow out the quickest and is fine at around 6-9 months. Flavour profiles seem to change a bit the longer you leave it also. I made some Bullace, a wild plum, vodka which started to get some cherry notes to it after the 2nd year.

Even in the urban areas you will almost certainly be able to find wild sloes, they grow everywhere at this time of year. Blackberry season is over but you can use them too. Blackberry whiskey is particularly nice. You can use the fruits from the supermarkets, grocers or the frozen fruits. I bought some damsons and greengages this year because I couldn't find any out in the wild. In fact using frozen fruits is ideal because the freezing process will burst the skins which just allows the alcohol to soak in quicker. Instructions usually say you should pierce the skins of sloes before adding into the gin but freezing just saves this labour intensive process. If you're using apples, pears or quinces grate them to get a better surface area to release more flavour.

I can't say I follow a recipe. Just about half fill a big kilner jar with fruit, add some sugar or honey and a bottle of the cheap alcohol, top up with some more fruits if there is space in the jar. Give it all a good stir the first couple of days to make sure the sugar dissolves but then leave the fruit in the alcohol for 6 ish months. Add some spices that might complement the fruit like apple and cinnamon, damson with cloves, mace, star anise etc. Rhubarb and vanilla. I strain out the fruits to add to crumble, make into jam or add to ice cream and let the liquor settle. There is usually some sediment at the bottle which you can strain through a coffee filter to make it totally clear.

Some great advice here, thank you!!

Had no idea you could get sloes on ebay. I'll keep an eye on the park bushes etc to see if I spot anything like them, I didn't think about the park but now you mention it I do recall seeing some berries there. Not sure what they are, they're a bright pink/red and almond shaped.

There aren't any berries that strongly resemble sloes that happen to be poisonous, are there? That'd put a damper on Xmas 😁

Bright pink/ red and almond shaped are more likely to be rosehips which ive never made into a boozy drink but have made syrups and cordials. It's a bit more of a faff because you need to blitz the hips, boil them in water and sugar the strain several times. The fluffy stuff inside the rosehips is what old school itching powder was made of. So really strain it well. I'm sure there probably are recipies online for rosehip booze. But there is loads of ways you can use them, they're packed with vitamin c.

Sloes are from the blackthorn tree which is used a lot in hedging so check around the edges of parks, cycle paths and canals. Look for some pictures online so you know the shape of the leaves and look out for the thorns on the tree, then you know youve found them. Theyre ready now and will be for another month or so you could find some. The berries themselves are unmistakable, like slightly bigger and rounder blueberries with that powdery look. You can eat them raw but it tastes incredibly bitter. It doesn't do you any harm but you won't do it again. Cooking or adding sugar is what makes them taste nice. I don't think there are many things that look like sloes that are poisonous. If it looks similar and the plant doesn't have thorns it's probably a wild plum but they're less likely in urban hedges.

I make a cranberry gin with frozen cranberries OP as they're easier to get hold of. Defrost them first and I don't bother putting them in kilner jars (although I have before.) I usually just wash a big Pyrex jug with soapy water then put it in the microwave for a minute or so until it is dry to sterilise it. Then pour the gin out of the bottle into the Pyrex jug. Add the cranberries to the bottle, a few strips of orange peel and the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Then top up with the gin and leave it in a dark cupboard for at least a month. You then get a lovely festive tasting gin and not all the gin fits back into the bottle so you get to make a bonus G&T with the excess 🤣.

I don't sterilise the gin bottle as I figure it's already sterile from the alcohol and I'm only putting that into a very clean container (the Pyrex jug) then back in the bottle.

Nigel Slater has 3 recipes for boozy fruits in his Christmas Chronicles-under November 1st.

There aren't any berries that strongly resemble sloes that happen to be poisonous, are there? That'd put a damper on Xmas 😁
Yes there are. Sloes are pretty easy to recognise if you know what you're looking for, but if you're not much of a naturalist there are several bad misidentifications you could make.