An experiment with Slider

While my apple trees have a fair bit of growing to do before they produce anything meaningful, there are some damsons and sloes in the wood. These had a bumper year last year. As a result, we filled numerous empty jars with sloes or damsons, sugar, and vodka or gin.  The sloe vodka is my favourite, especially when added to a glass of fizzy wine as a slightly superior Kir Royal.

So far, so good. The question is, when decanted, what to do with the booze-soaked berries? The damsons make a mean crumble when mixed with some apples or are delicious covered with molten chocolate and chucked in the fridge. The sloes are a different beast all together as they are pretty revolting as fruit.

Hunting around on the web we discovered a recipe for sloe sherry, so got a jar of this on the go, and then thought about trying sloe cider - or slider. Recipe as follows:

1. Half fill a jar with sozzled berries and top up with cider
2. Leave for about 4 weeks shaking from time to time

We cracked it open for the rugby yesterday and it was a delicious; a turbo-charged and less sweet cider and black. Despite having zapped the cider with sulphur before bottling, it had started fermenting again and so had a slight spritz (steeping under airlock may have been more sensible). Highly recommended!

(The sloe sherry wasn't too bad either.)

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