Plymouth Sloe Gin - finally some high quality sloe gin

Ahh, the halcyon days of college when a roommate decided to get fancy and make a Singapore Sling cocktail. His recipe included sloe gin, powdered sugar, 7-Up and other stuff which I can't recall. It was bright red and tasted like high-octane Kool-aid with a bit of a nasty finish (especially if you drank too much of it!).

That was my only encounter with sloe gin until recently when I came across Plymouth Sloe Gin. Plymouth's regular gin is quite tasty, so I took a chance and brought this bottle to see if sloe gin had improved over the years. And indeed it has. This sloe gin is nothing like the cheap, excessively sweet, cough syrup stuff that is usually found on the bottom shelves of liquor stores. Plymouth uses a recipe from 1883 which infuses the sloe berry (a type of bitter plum) with their Plymouth gin, some sugar and water. The result is a tart yet sweet drink with a hint of almond in the finish. In Britain, sloe gin is often drunk in small glasses during winter months, a bit like port.

As for that Singapore Sling cocktail? Turns out that using sloe gin is a somewhat rarer variant of the drink. Most Slings use cherry brandy. But here are a couple of recipes which do a better job of featuring sloe gin (by which I mean the good quality stuff like Plymouth).

Gin Lane (adapted from 2008 Food and Wine Cocktails)
2 lemon wedges
2 dashes Angostura Bitters
1 oz gin
1 oz Plymouth Sloe Gin
1/2 oz sweet vermouth
1/2 oz Cointreau

Muddle lemon wedges with bitters. Add the rest of the ingredients, shake with ice and strain into a martini glass.

Here's another recipe which I'd like to try just because it has a great name. It was popular in London in the 1990s.

Wibble
1 ounce gin
1 ounce Plymouth Sloe Gin
½ ounce crème de cassis
1 ounce fresh grapefruit juice
½ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice.
Shake with ice and strain into a glass.

Plymouth Sloe Gin is found in a number of Seattle liquor stores.