1 1/2 ounces sloe gin
1 ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/2 to 3/4 ounce simple syrup, to taste
Club soda, to top
Optional garnish: cocktail cherry and/or lemon wedge
Add the sloe gin, lemon juice and simple syrup to a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice. Shake until frosty and strain over ice into a highball or collins glass. Top with club soda and garnish with a cocktail cherry, a lemon wedge, or both.
For those who don’t know, Sloe Gin a liqueur made from a sloe berry. These tiny tart jammy little berries grow in clumps on blackthorn trees in England and Western Europe. They’re a cousin to the plum.
In Europe sloe gin is usually made at home by harvesting sloes berries from and infusing them in gin with sugar. It’s usually bottled in the fall and matured for a few months, so it’s usually considered a winter drink.
In America, a lot of Sloe Gin is artificially flavored and colored, producing brightly red, super fruity, and syrupy sweet, liqueur that was perfect for 80s classic cocktails like the Alabama Slammer or the Sloe Comfortable Screw.
Thankfully, a few years back Plymouth Gin started producing a classic, English style sloe gin based on an 1883 recipe and now Hayman’s and Sipsmith are making the real stuff too. Greensmith’s gin in Greenpoint Brooklyn makes a beach plum gin that’s supposed to taste very similar. Beach plums are a cousin to the sloe berry indigenous to the Atlantic coast from Maryland to Maine.
The sloe gin fizz is a take on the classic gin fizz made with gin, lemon, sugar, seltzer, and an egg white. For a sloe gin fizz, you just swap the sloe gin for regular gin, and leave out the egg white. It’s lighter and brighter than a traditional gin fizz, and Sloe gin is less boozy than regular gin so you can have as many as you want. It’s bright and tart and sweet and tastes a bit like a (slightly) alcoholic Italian Soda.