This Strawberry Gin Liqueur is our perfect sip for summer!
Jun 20, 2022
Here at Craft Gin Club, we love making a new discovery about a special craft distiller or delicious new gin product. And we’ve found one that we’re really eager to tell you about! Drum roll, please…
Welcome Sorted Food x Sloemotion Distillery Strawberry Gin Liqueur with Vanilla and Black Pepper! It’s the perfect strawberry gin liqueur for summer - and with Wimbledon around the corner, it’s got those classic British flavours that are best enjoyed with a bit of sunshine!
As many of you know, our panel of experts taste over 400 gins (we know, we know - someone has to do the hard job!) per year to select just 12 to be in our Gin of the Month boxes. Some could say we’re a tough bunch to please!
Excitingly, this is the first gin liqueur outside our Family of Distillers to be chosen for our Craft Gin Club online shop so it’s a very special moment for us all…
We apply our rigorous taste testing to absolutely everything we stock on our Craft Gin Club online shop (like our snacks, mixers, and rums!) - including this gin liqueur. And we are as impressed with its taste as we are with the story behind it (and its sustainability creds)…
Made by Sloemotion Distillery at Green Farm, north of York, the business began by accident, when a farming initiative to improve wildlife habitats resulted in an abundance of sloes.
This brand-new strawberry gin liqueur is packed with Annabel’s Deliciously British surplus strawberries into Sloemotion’s original Hedgerow Gin.
Not only that, the core elements of the gin have been sourced from within 30 miles of each other (the bottle from Leeds, and the strawberries from the Yorkshire countryside). Even the botanicals are foraged from the hedgerows on their farm!
And the distillery’s impressive eco-credentials were noticed by Sorted Food (a group of foodie friends, who started a channel on YouTube 12 years ago, with recipe videos, fun cooking challenges and food and drink reviews).
The friendship between the two began last summer, when Sorted Food featured Sloemotion Distillery’s award-winning Sloe Gin in one of their videos as an example of a drinks business embracing rewilding on UK farmland.
Soon after, the team at Sloemotion invited Sorted Food co-founder, Ben Ebbrell, to come and visit the farm.
And they took their taste-testing process seriously, says Ben of Sorted Food: “After lots of brainstorming Joff tried our favourite ideas and sent the samples to London. In the studio, we gathered around as a team to sniff, sip and slurp the gin on its own and with various mixers across many rounds. The challenge was holding back on the creativity and picking ideas that elevated the strawberry gin and didn’t hide it!”
The strawberry flavour really is something else: “So many people taste it and say they are surprised how much it smells and tastes of REAL strawberry. There are other strawberry gins on the market, but they don’t make use of quite such a volume of real strawberries, many use strawberry extracts or flavourings”.
So if you adore the flavours of strawberries - it’s definitely one for you.
It’s balanced out gorgeously with some vanilla and a hint of black pepper to give the liqueur a warming savoury finish that is simply divine.
On the nose, it’s bursting with fresh strawberries and summer meadow flavours. On the palate, it’s smooth, fruity, and has a roundness of vanilla. It finishes with the subtle warming of black pepper spice, with medium sweetness.
Botanicals: Juniper, coriander, angelica, orris and bay, plus crab apple, rosehip, elderflower, nettle leaf, wildflower and meadow hay (the last six are foraged from the farm and local hedgerows)
Put simply, we urge you to give it a try!
50ml strawberry gin liqueur
Artisan lime tonic
Lime and Black peppercorn, to garnish
50ml strawberry gin liqueur
30ml lemon juice
10ml simple syrup
4 basil leaves
Basil and Strawberry, to garnish
Slap four basil leaves in your palm (to release more aromas) and put them in your shaker. Add the gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup with ice and shake well. Strain into a rocks glass filled with ice and top with a splash of soda. Garnish with basil sprig and a strawberry.
We were delighted to be asked by the guys at Sorted Food to create this quintessentially British summer product; it smacks of sun-drenched garden parties and pitchers full of deliciously fruity cocktails. We particularly love that, like us, Sorted Food recognises the issues that face the environment; our two businesses teaming up helps get the message out there with a product that has sustainability at its heart.
— Joff Curtoys, Sloemotion Distillery Co-founder
