I've received a few complaints recently about the mess associated with my brewing enterprises. Bottling long overdue demijohns of wine and generally tidying up has restored domestic harmony up to a point. The "point" was reached when it came to my current batches of sloe gin and sloe vodka, which gave me a further opportunity to make something else rather nice and yet another mess in the kitchen.

Lots of things are left over from wine- and beer-making, and, while most end up on the compost heap, some are too good to throw away. Blackberries from blackberry whisky and cherries from homemade "cherry brandy" are terrific in a fruit salad or trifle, but sloes are pretty disgusting after they have spent a few months making sloe gin (as indeed they are before making sloe gin).



I tend to leave my sloes to soak for a good long time in order to get as much flavour from them as possible, especially to extract the almond essences from their stony hearts. Six months is about right. However, they do retain some of their flavour at the end and, more importantly, some alcohol. Some misguided souls have embarked on chocolate coated sloes but you should not.

First of all it is a Herculean task to remove the stone; second, the resulting chocolates are quite awful. Even with a thick layer of chocolate the mouth-numbing astringency of used sloes is overwhelming and is not offset by any acidity, this having been transferred to the gin. If that is not enough to put you off, the texture is that of slow-casseroled shoe leather. Much better is to continue as you began and make something alcoholic out of them.

"Slider" is a splendid punning name for what you get from infusing used sloes in cider. The name nicely conveys both the way it slides down and the way you too might slide down the wall if you have too much: homemade cider is deadly enough without the addition of gin.

Slider is very easy to make but the sugar contained in the sloes can easily start your cider fermenting again. If you do not want any explosions it is well worth making the infusion in a thoroughly clean demi-john and fitting an airlock. The process takes about a month, by which time the otherwise tragically lost alcohol will have been extracted from the sloes and any fermentation completed. I have not experimented with doing the whole thing in a champagne bottle to produce sparkling slider, but if you wish to tread this treacherous path put your bottles in the shed at the end of the garden with appropriate hazard signs.

Adding cider to the sloes used to make sloe vodka. Photograph: John Wright

If you have a lot of sloes then half-fill a demi-john with them and top up with cider. If you just want to try it out or only have a small amount of sloes this can be accommodated in any bottle which has the right diameter neck for a bubble-trap bung. Leave it for a month or so and strain it into bottles. Oxygen is the death of many alcoholic drinks so avoid splashing the cider around too much when pouring it into the demi-john and the final bottle.

The resulting drink is fruity, almondy and pink. Compared to sloe gin it is a long drink, but not that long. You can give it an extra burst of flavour and sweetness, not to mention additional alcohol, by serving it with a dash of sloe gin.

With my elderberry wine just about ready I also tried using this instead of cider. I one-third filled a bottle with used sloes from some sloe vodka, added 70cl of the sloe vodka itself and topped it up with elderberry wine. The high alcohol content of the wine plus the vodka prevented further fermentation so I just screwed on a top. A sip when I decanted it after a couple of weeks told me that this stuff had turned out much better than I had dared hope, though I'm going to let it mature in peace for a bit to mellow. My only problem is what to call this sherry-like drink – slerry; sline; slort?