When I started tending bar back in 1986, I encountered sloe gin that was pretty much neutral spirits, artificial color and artificial flavor. It was there almost exclusively as a necessary component to the Alabama Slammer and so was rarely even picked up on its own. It had to share a hand with at least one or maybe two (depending on the skill of the bartender) other bottles, while slopping the sugary, fake, multi-ingredient headache maker together in a tall glass.
It wasn't until I went to Ireland for the first time that I encountered real sloe gin. The sloe berries are harvested in the fall from blackthorn bushes. They're much to bitter too eat on their own, but they can be made either into jam or into sloe gin. The latter is made by steeping them with some sugar in gin. The bottles are sealed in the fall and agitated (sometimes by putting under the table at dinner for the kids to kick around), and not opened until Christmas: Not the stuff of Alabama Slammers. Plymouth gin was the first commercial sloe gin to be re-introduced in America a few years back. We were, of course, the first bar in NJ to carry it.
This year, we lost a great poet. Seamus Heaney was Poet Laureate of Ireland. He wrote some of the most profound and moving Irish verse of the latter 20th century. But here's one that I first discovered attached to a bottle of the home-made stuff that was given to me as a present.
Sloe Gin
The clear weather of juniper
darkened into winter.
She fed gin to sloes
and sealed the glass container.
When I unscrewed it
I smelled the disturbed
tart stillness of a bush
rising through the pantry.
When I poured it
it had a cutting edge
and flamed
like Betelgeuse.
I drink to you
in smoke-mirled, blue-black,
polished sloes, bitter
and dependable.
Friday evening we will serve the Sloe Gin Fizz and also The Blackthorne Cocktail for just $8. If you can recite the above poem from memory, there will be no prize, but we will be impressed, and your soul will be enriched. We will pass hors d'oevres from 9 PM and the most tasteful cocktail enthusiasts of The Garden State will be in attendance, as is their custom. We hope you can join us.
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