The year before last I spent some time infusing gin and brandy with fruit. My favourite two were plum gin and damson gin. So on the lead up to World Gin Day (Saturday) and in honour of my newly acquired plum tree! I thought it would be a good time to revisit the recipe for the plum gin.
I used a litre of gin to a kilo of victoria plums and 200g of sugar, and I left it to do it’s thing for 3 months. Then strained it off into another bottle and left it for a month. It was very good.
Maybe this year I will get some plums off the tree on the allotment (Joe who used to tend the plot says it’s unlikely as people take plums off it as they walk by!) but even if I don’t, I intend to make this gin again this year. My only change this year will be to use a different gin. I used Bombay Gin for this and it’s has an ABV of 37.5%, I would strongly recommend using a gin with an ABV no lower than 40%, which I did with the damson gin and that worked well.
Beefeater and Tanqueray both often come up on offer and are good gins. Supermarket own brand gins are often bottled at 37.5% but Waitrose’s Premium London Dry Gin comes in one litre bottles for £21 and although I haven’t tried it myself, many of my gin drinking friends really rate it. I’m a big fan of Sainsbury’s Blackfriars Gin which comes in at 43% ABV and often goes on offer.
If you can get damsons (one day the allotment will have a damson tree) then do the same thing for a richer, darker gin than the plum gin. However both are good and worth making. When you’ve made the gin you can use the plums or damsons in a crumble or make jam with them! I think a small bottle of gin and pot of gin flavoured plum jam would be a welcome present!
You can also make cocktails with the gin. I refer you to the Huzzah!
Slug bait was sprinkled and the whole place was beginning to look like an allotment instead of a wasteland with some fruit on it.
to this
The beans are not looking so great right now but we’ll see how they do, I just about have time to sow straight in the ground if these don’t work!
The plan for next weekend is to get some more dug over and under cover, weed the raspberries and get some runner beans and peas in the ground. Maybe there will also be time (and energy) to get another bed going for salad and wildflowers.
There is still lots of work to do but I’m feeling better about it. And I picked some flowers…
But look at the amazing poppies! Later on, I had to go back to the allotment to pick up the spare tomato plants that Ian (another allotment holder) had given me
Tuesday was back to work. I was up early all over the weekend but that 6am call on work days is soul destroying.
My week didn’t get any worse, in fact it was significantly meh. There was no reason for this, work was fine, home was fine, even with the living room looking like a greenhouse! I was fine. I was also stupidly tired, frazzled and generally out of sorts. By Thursday morning, I was pretty much resigned to getting through the week feeling that I had gotten out of the wrong side of bed and I just needed to get the hell over it.
