Raspberry Gin

Inspired by our recent efforts in homebrewing beer and elderflower champagne, I've branched out into a raspberry gin.

After much research I decided to follow this recipe , as the cottage smallholder is a very interesting blog, with many surprising and interesting alcoholic recipes, that I'd love to try, however this gin does float my boat. The only downside is waiting at least 3 months before getting it into a glass!

Anyway, it involves the following:

2 bottles of gin (we've not followed the recipe here and bought the cheapest we could find - in fact it's one gin for me, and one vodka for 'er indoors). We may live to regret this, but being an experiment, we can always adapt wit hthe next batch (I'm hoping to try to convince 'er indoors that another bottle this summer wouldn't be a bad idea!)

300 grams of raspberries - I bought 2 smaller boxes, and discarded any mankier looking ones after washing.

300 grams of white sugar - maybe a touch more for the vodka

I basically halved the sugar and berries. I rammed the berries into each bottle, funnelled in the sugar, and topped up with spirit.

Then the aim is to shale regularly until the sugar dissolves, then put it in a dry, cool, dark cupboard and forget about it for ages. It's important to keep this out of the sunlight, to stop any UV light affecting the gin. You can test regulary, as the website says, and top up with sugar if needed.

I think I'll take the berries out in a bout 6 months time (so around November/December time), as they can turn against you if left in there.

You will have leftover gin/vodka from each bottle, so either have some spare bottles to top up, or get 'em into jam jars with the leftover berries and some sugar for a touch more fruit spirit, as we've done!

I'm looking forward to it already!