The Brewing Shed

Sloe beer. A gin soaked experiment

Sloe Gin Beer

Every year Rich makes a splendidly potent booze called ‘slider’.* This involves reawakening a fermented, sleepy cider with a sweet dose of sloes salvaged from a sloe gin infusion. Last year he neglected to make his own sloe gin so pilfered a load of my boozy fruit instead. Apparently the resulting slider was of exceptional quality – but I wouldn’t know this because he has guzzled the lot himself (thanks for the sloes, Nick).

Fortunately I held back some sloes for myself – not to make my own slider but to see how a beer equivalent** might turn out.

For this experiment I figured a brown, malty beer might best offset the sour, fruity tang of the sloes and cope well with the increased alcohol provided by both the residual gin and additional fermentable sugar. So I brewed up a brown bitter.

After a few days of vigorous fermentation the yeasty head (krausen) subsided so I racked off some of the beer into a demijohn and pitched in a handful of sozzled sloes.

Ten days later my experimental brew was bottled, along with a sloe-free control batch of the same brown bitter, and it is now time to taste the goods.

Sloe beer: the verdict

First up, the regular brown beer is good. One of my better batches. Smooth and malty with a decent bitter finish. And the sloes definitely add a new dimension to the brew giving it a subtle, fruitier aroma and an essence of sharp gin slicing through the finish. In fact I’m so pleased with the results that I’ve declared it too good to spare Rich a bottle…

 

* sloe + cider = slider

** I don’t know if the sloe gin and beer combo has a name as I don’t know if anyone has ever made it before. But from now on it shall be known as ‘slobber’ (sloe + brown bitter)

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