Sloe gin: how to find the sloes, make it properly, and give it away at Christmas

By Linda Garrould · Published 6 September 2026

Sloe gin is 450g of ripe sloes, 200g of sugar and a 70cl bottle of gin, shaken now and then and left for three months. That is the whole recipe, and you will find it in the same one line on every page Google shows you. What the two-line versions leave out is everything that goes wrong: picking the wrong fruit, picking it too early, picking it where you should not, and forgetting that a bottle for Christmas needs the sloes in the jar by the last week of September. This page is about all of that, and about growing your own so you never have to go looking again.

A family method, and why it works

In my husband’s family the sloes were pricked. Every one, by hand, with a needle, at the kitchen table, by his father. The point of the pricking is to let the gin through the skin; a sloe is a small hard plum with a tough coat, and left whole it gives up its colour and flavour very slowly. The old alternative was to wait for the first frost to split the skins, which is where the advice to pick after a frost comes from.

The freezer does the same thing. A night in a bag at minus eighteen bursts the cell walls far more thoroughly than a needle, and it lets you pick the fruit when it is ripe rather than when the weather obliges. Sipsmith, the London distillers who make rather a lot of the stuff commercially, say freezing is better than pricking, and they are right. There is still a case for pricking a bowlful as well, if there is time and a child who wants a job, because there is a pleasure in it that the freezer cannot supply. The gin does not notice either way.

What sloes are, and how to identify them

A sloe is the fruit of the blackthorn, Prunus spinosa, the thorny shrub that turns whole hedgerows white in March before a single leaf appears. It grows to three or four metres, its bark is dark and its twigs nearly black, and its thorns are long, straight and vicious; the tips break off under the skin and fester, so pick in gloves and long sleeves. The fruit is round, a centimetre or so across, blue-black under a dusty grey bloom that rubs off with the thumb, with a single hard stone. Bite one raw and it dries the whole mouth. That astringency is the surest identification there is.

Several other blue-black hedgerow fruits grow in the same places, and the chart below puts them side by side. The edible ones are all its relatives: damsons, bullace and cherry plums, each with one stone in plum-like flesh, each of which makes a perfectly good gin. The one to know and avoid is purging buckthorn, a thorny shrub whose glossy black berries grow in clusters, have three or four seeds inside, and do what the name says; the Woodland Trust calls them slightly poisonous, which is a polite way of putting it. Wild privet is the other, thornless and glossy, and poisonous. The rule that covers all of it: one hard stone in plum-like flesh on a thorny shrub is a sloe; several seeds, or a glossy berry with no bloom that you cannot name, is not, and goes back on the bush.

Children can help pick and will want to, but hedgerow berries are not for eating on the walk. A raw sloe will not hurt them beyond the face they pull; a buckthorn berry will. Keep the tub for the fruit and the rule simple: nothing goes in a mouth until an adult has said so.

Where to pick sloes, and whether you are allowed to

Blackthorn is everywhere: field hedges, footpath edges, commons, scrub on chalk and clay, and the banks of canals and rivers, where the Canal & River Trust publishes its own sloe gin recipe and invites you to pick from the towpath. The best bushes are usually the ones nobody else has noticed, on a path a little further from the car park. Roadside fruit is best left; it carries whatever the traffic leaves on it.

The law is friendlier than most people think. Under section 4(3) of the Theft Act 1968, picking fruit, flowers, foliage or fungi growing wild on any land is not theft unless it is done for sale or reward, so a tub of sloes for your own jar is not stealing, wherever the bush is.

The limits are different ones. You may not uproot a plant without the landowner’s permission; that is an offence under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. On private land you are still trespassing if you leave the path, so ask. Nature reserves and National Trust land have their own byelaws, protected sites carry their own restrictions, and some forbid foraging altogether; read the signage. In Scotland the Outdoor Access Code applies and the position is much the same.

Then there is manners. The Countryside Code asks you to leave the countryside as you found it, the Woodland Trust’s foraging guidance is to take a share and leave most of it, and a hedgerow in October is feeding the fieldfares and redwings that have just arrived as well as the thrushes that were here already. Pick from waist height up, so the dog-height fruit stays where it is, and leave the bush looking as though nobody has been.

If there is no hedgerow within reach, a good farmers’ market will sometimes have sloes in September, and damsons more often; both work.

When to pick sloes

By ripeness, not by the calendar and not by the frost. Squeeze one: a ripe sloe gives slightly under the thumb and the skin splits, and it comes off the twig without a tug; an unripe one is a marble. In most of England that is the last week of September into October; further north, and in Scotland, October into November. August fruit is there and it is tempting, but it is hard, green inside and harsh, and it makes thin gin. If the bush is heavy and you are worried about the birds getting there first, pick what is ripe now and come back; a hedge ripens over a fortnight, not in a day.

The recipe

A standard method: sugar in at the start, with the fruit weight at the upper end of the usual range for colour. Sipsmith prefer to leave the sugar out until the gin is strained and sweeten it to taste at the end, which gives you more control; the sugar-first version below is the simpler one. Any gin at forty per cent or above will do; more on that below.

Ingredients (for a 70cl bottle)

• 450g ripe sloes, rinsed and picked over
• 200g white caster sugar
• 70cl gin, any brand at 40% or above

Scaling it up

Jar size	Sloes	Sugar	Gin
1.5 litre jar (or two 1-litre)	450g	200g	70cl (one bottle)
2 litre jar	650g	300g	1 litre
3 litre jar	900g	400g	1.4 litres (two bottles)

Method

1. Freeze the sloes overnight in a bag, or prick each one three or four times with a needle or a clean fork. Freezing is the more thorough; pricking is the more sociable.
2. Tip the sloes into a sterilised 1.5 or 2 litre clip-top jar. Add the sugar, then pour over the gin. Seal.
3. Shake it once a day for the first week, until the sugar has dissolved, then once a week. Keep it somewhere dark and cool; a cupboard under the stairs is ideal.
4. Taste it at eight weeks. If it is too sharp, add a little more sugar and shake; if it is sweet enough, leave it.
5. At about three months, strain through muslin into a jug, then through a paper coffee filter if you want it clear, and bottle. Do not leave the fruit in for longer than four months or the stones start to make it bitter.
6. It is drinkable now and better in a year. Keep a bottle back to find out.

How long to leave it

Daily shakes for the first week dissolve the sugar; after that, once a week is plenty, and once a fortnight is forgivable. It is drinkable at eight weeks and noticeably better at twelve. Strain the fruit out at about three months and no later than four: the stones contain amygdalin, the bitter-almond compound that breaks down into the almond-scented benzaldehyde, and left too long it turns the gin bitter and marzipan-flavoured rather than fruity. Once it is bottled and the fruit is out, it keeps for years and improves for at least one; the spirit preserves it, and there is nothing in it to spoil.

Bottling, labelling and giving it away

The muslin takes out the fruit and the pulp; the coffee filter takes out the haze, and it is slow, so do it while the radio is on. Bottle into 500ml swing-tops; a 70cl batch comes out at roughly 850ml once the sugar and the fruit have added their share, which is one full bottle and most of a second. Label them with the date, because in a year you will not remember which batch was the good one.

The calendar matters if the bottles are presents. Three months from jar to bottle means sloes in gin by the last week of September for a bottle on the table on Christmas Day, and by mid-October for a bottle that is drinkable but young. If you are later than that, make it anyway and give it at Easter, when nobody else does. For the rest of the hamper, our sister site has a guide to the best Christmas hampers and a gift guide that goes well beyond gin.

Damson gin, and the other fruit that works

Damsons are the sloe’s larger, sweeter, better-behaved cousin, and they make a rounder, less austere gin, and some people prefer it. The method is the same with the quantities shifted towards the fruit: 350g of damsons, 200g of sugar and a litre of gin, whole fruit, three months as before; the pricking is optional, though a fork through each one does no harm. Bullace, the wild plum, is treated exactly like a big sloe. Blackberries make a gin that is gone by Boxing Day. Whatever the fruit, the ratio of about a third fruit to two-thirds gin by weight, with sugar at roughly half the fruit weight, is the frame to start from.

Do not throw the sloes away

The strained fruit has three months of gin in it. Stone it first, because the stones are the bit you should not eat, then fold the flesh through melted dark chocolate and set it in a tin for sloe gin chocolates, the classic use. Or do what some people do and top the used fruit up with a bottle of cheap red wine for a few weeks, then strain again: a rough sloe port, and better than it sounds. Or the compost heap, which is a perfectly good third choice.

Grow your own sloes

You can, and a blackthorn hedge is one of the cheapest wildlife hedges you can plant, and a good one for hedgehogs if you leave a gap at the base and put a hedgehog house in its shade, but be clear about what you are planting. Blackthorn is thorny to the point of hostility, it suckers freely and will colonise a lawn if you let it, and it is a hedge plant rather than a specimen; it is right for a boundary on a bigger garden or an allotment edge, and wrong for a small one. Plant bare-root whips from November to March, three to the metre, cut back to about 30cm after planting to make them bush, and expect the first sloes after a few years and a useful crop a few years after that. It is sold cheaply as bare-root hedging in bundles from November, and in pots the rest of the year.

If that sounds like more hedge than you want, plant a damson. A self-fertile variety such as ‘Merryweather’ has none of blackthorn’s thorns, stays a manageable size, needs no partner, and from a potted tree typically fruits within two or three years; it makes the same gin, and jam, and the tree is a good thing to have in a garden anyway. The blackthorn and the damson below are both live listings; the bare-root blackthorn bundles come back into stock in November.

As an Amazon Associate, Saturday & Sunday earns from qualifying purchases. It costs you nothing extra; it helps keep the site running and the kettle on. Availability and links were checked on 6 September 2026 and can change.

The kit

A clip-top jar big enough to take the fruit and the gin with room to shake, muslin or a straining bag, a funnel, swing-top bottles and labels. A demijohn and airlock, which some pages will sell you, are for fermenting and are no use here: nothing ferments in forty per cent spirit. Below is what we would buy.

As an Amazon Associate, Saturday & Sunday earns from qualifying purchases. It costs you nothing extra; it helps keep the site running and the kettle on. Availability and links were checked on 6 September 2026 and can change.

A word on the gin, and on drinking it

Any gin at forty per cent or more. The Sipsmith distillery would tell you to use a good one; our view is that the sloes overwhelm anything subtle and supermarket own-label is fine, but it is a fair argument either way. What you end up with is a liqueur at roughly twenty-five to thirty per cent, which is between one and a quarter and one and a half units in a 50ml measure, so it is a sipping drink rather than a long one. Keep the jar and the bottles out of children’s reach; a two-litre jar of purple sweetness on a low shelf is an invitation. Drinkaware has the numbers if you want them.

Sloe gin: your questions answered

How to make sloe gin at home?

Prick or freeze 450g of ripe sloes, put them in a sterilised jar with 200g of white caster sugar and 70cl of gin, seal, shake daily for a week and weekly after that, taste at eight weeks, and strain and bottle at about three months. The full method, with a scale-up table for one or two bottles of gin, is above.

How many sloes for 1 litre of gin?

About 650g of sloes and 300g of sugar for a litre of gin, which fills a two-litre jar comfortably. Recipes range from 350g to 700g of fruit per litre; more fruit gives a deeper colour and more almond from the stones, and you can always add sugar later but you cannot take it out.

How many berries to make sloe gin?

By weight rather than by count: 450g of sloes for a 70cl bottle, which is somewhere in the hundreds depending on the size of the fruit that year. Weigh them; counting sloes is a job for a wet afternoon you do not have.

How long should sloes stay in gin?

Three months is the sweet spot. Two months is drinkable; three is the rule and four the outer limit, and beyond that the stones begin to add a bitter, marzipan edge. Strain the fruit out, bottle the gin, and let it mature in the bottle instead.

How to tell when sloe berries are ripe?

Squeeze one. A ripe sloe gives slightly under the thumb and the skin splits; an unripe one is hard as a marble. Ripe fruit is blue-black with a dusty grey bloom, and it comes away from the twig without a tug. In most of England that is late September into October; in the north and in Scotland, October into November.

Is August too early to pick sloes?

Almost always, yes. The fruit is there from August but it is hard, green-fleshed and mouth-puckeringly sour, and it makes thin, harsh gin. Wait for the give-under-the-thumb test, which usually means the last week of September at the earliest.

Can you eat sloe berries straight off the tree?

You can, and you will not do it twice: a raw sloe is so astringent it dries the whole mouth. It is not poisonous, but the stone contains amygdalin, like all Prunus stones, so do not chew or crush those. The fruit is for gin, jelly and hedgerow jam, not for eating raw.

What to do with sloes once picked?

Rinse them, pick out the stalks and leaves, and either freeze them in a bag (which also does the pricking for you) or use them within a day or two. Sloe gin is the classic; sloe jelly, hedgerow jam with blackberries and apples, and sloe vodka are the others worth making.

Do I need to wait for a frost before I pick sloes?

No. The old rule about waiting for the first frost was about the frost splitting the skins so the gin could get in; a night in the freezer does exactly the same job, and lets you pick the fruit when it is ripe rather than when the weather decides. Pick by ripeness, freeze overnight, and ignore the forecast.

Sources

• Theft Act 1968, section 4(3) — picking wild fruit is not theft unless for sale or reward; Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, section 13 — uprooting.
• Woodland Trust: blackthorn; purging buckthorn; the Trust’s foraging guidelines; RHS: potentially harmful garden plants — privet (Ligustrum) is listed as harmful if eaten.
• Gardeners’ World: how to grow blackthorn — planting and pruning, and the note that all parts of Prunus spinosa other than the fruit flesh are harmful if eaten.
• delicious. magazine: damson gin — the 350g damson ratio.
• Sipsmith: how to make the perfect sloe gin — on freezing rather than pricking, and sweetening at the end.
• Wild Food People: do I need to wait for a frost?
• Canal & River Trust: sloes by the canals and rivers.
• The Countryside Code; Scottish Outdoor Access Code.
• Drinkaware unit calculator.

Related reading

• Family recipes — including what to do with the rest of the hedgerow.
• Mrs Robins’ boiled fruit cake — the other thing to make in October for December.
• Can you freeze butter? — and everything else; the freezer is the sloe-ginner’s friend.
• Best Christmas hampers and the Christmas gift guide on christmascountdown.co.uk — for the rest of the parcel.
• Weekend gardening — hedges, damsons and what else to plant this autumn.

Read next

Chocolate Concrete Recipe

August 16, 2026 →

Gypsy Tart Recipe

August 16, 2026 →

Cornflake Tart Recipe

August 16, 2026 →

Stone Cream Recipe

August 16, 2026 →