City Of London Sloe Gin

The perfect balance of classic Gin and mouth-watering sloe berry.

The City of London Distillery is as much a bar as it is a producer of quality adult beverages. Actually, to be accurate, they opened a distillery “in” a bar on December 20th, 2012 … Johnathan Clark’s cocktail bar on Bride Street, London, to be precise. As you may imagine, if you open a distillery literally “inside” an operating cocktail bar, you do NOT have 30,000 gallon tanks. These guys are a micro-distillery from the get-go.

Don’t get us wrong, these guys bought top-end equipment—professional-grade copper pot-stills from Germany. But they hold about 50 liters at a crack, so it will be quite a while before you find bottles of their quality hooch at the MegaMart. And with a name like “The City of London,” you better represent! And Represent they do, producing five signature Gins in all of their classic juniper-licious glory.

Today we are talking about their City of London Sloe Gin. If you need a refresher, Sloe Gin is a Gin—any style—that has been steeped in sloe berries (blackthorn berries) which grow wild across the UK. It started as a way for country folk to cover up the poor taste of the Gin that they could afford to buy. But when you use quality berries, quality Gin, and modern production you end up with a classic little bit of Britain in a glass.

City of London Sloe Gin starts as their classic London Dry Gin that is steeped with macerated sloe berries and a hint of sweet. It’s just lovely to look at, taking on an iridescent ruby-red hue that looks as good as it tastes. And tasty-good it is too, striking a perfect balance between the earthy herbal-ness and pine of the Gin and the mouth-watering juiciness of berry. We say it is great chilled and neat or as the base for a Sloe Gin Negroni cocktail.

SmartAss Corner

A shot of Sloe Gin is sometimes called a “stirrup cup” because the villagers would bring out a little glass of Sloe Gin as a thank you to the hunters—still on horseback—who had just cleared their farms of foxes.