fruit + booze

 

In summer an entire kitchen shelf gets taken up by rhubarb and various berries soaking away in gin or vodka. There are a number of reasons for this – unlike most projects centered on preserving the best of the season this is a quick and easy task, and during spring and summer we were working too much to have energy for anything beyond chopping up fruit and adding it to alcohol. There is also the fact of what we actually consume a lot of in this house. There is a finite number of jams, jellies, and preserved fruit we can eat, and none of those are on daily rotation. But we make cocktails every night. This is a gin house.

 

 

Pictured here is a combination of this year’s batches, with some still left over from summer 2015. The bulk of our stash is rhubarb gin – cheaper than the berries, and during the season I keep on buying rhubarb a few times a week and don’t always get to actually bake with it, which means it gets dumped in gin, or more recently, vodka. Sometimes we add sugar, other times we don’t, and mix in some simple syrup into whichever cocktail we’re doing instead. We’ve been following the lead of our friend Marie, and adding sugar to the blackcurrant and redcurrant gin, which makes it less astringent. There’s also a strawberry vodka, and a raspberry vodka, and I realise both of these sound very California Barbie, but fuck it, they are delicious. I plan on spending my summer drinking it mixed with some Cava for a bastardised French 75, if you will.

 

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