2013: The Year of Booze

A couple of years ago, my sister gave me the fantastic gift of a homebrew kit. Delicious cider soon followed. I got a bit out of practice last year but the warm summer seemed the perfect incitement to cider.

In June I made an elderflower cider kit. I'm a strong opponent of fruit flavoured cider (cherry 'cider' is not cider!) but the result is deliciously appley with a subtle extra taste of elderflower. For the first time ever, I actually had enough bottles for the whole batch and I ended up with more than 40 bottles in the cupboard.

In July, I experimented with elderflower champagne. Finding the elderflowers proved to be the biggest hurdle. Burnham was bare so I snuck round to my parents and thieved some from the back field, suffering retribution in the form of extreme hayfever. Although I followed the recipe, the champagne fermented out entirely so I primed the bottles as I normally would for cider. 

The result was interesting. At first I wasn't impressed, probably because I subconsciously was expecting something more like the sweetness of elderflower cordial. But, once it was refrigerated and reasonably sparkling, it turned out to be refreshing and delicious. And, most importantly, non-explosive!

Now it's autumn and time to think about sloe gin. Ignoring the nonsense about waiting for the first frost, I headed out to my secret sloe locations and ran out of boxes before I ran out of sloes. I was raised to ignore quantities when it comes to sloe gin so the recipe is simply: fill a jar with sloes; fill the gaps with sugar; fill the gaps with gin. Wait.

This put me in the infusing mood so, when my mum offered me a reasonably large quantity of plums going spare from her tree, the obvious solution seemed to be alcohol-related. Gin? Vodka? How could I consider anything beyond the fabulously rhyming plum rum! Fortunately, I'm not the only one to attempt plum rum and this blog has a fascinating recipe (plums, rum and tasty spices!).

Due to a miscalculation, I bought a bit too much rum for the recipe. Now spare rum isn't really a problem but I also had a kilner jar spare and spare rum + spare kilner jar = a challenge. Fortunately, this blog gave me the solution (while also helping me use up a spare orange in the process). So now I have a jar of 44 cordial in the cupboard too!